Anastasija Ropa

Imagining the 1456 Siege of Belgrade in Capystranus

 

The poem Capystranus, devoted to the 1456 Siege of Belgrade by the Ottoman Turks, was printed three times between 1515 and 1530 by Wynkyn de Worde. It survives in a fragmentary form, testifying to its popularity with the audience. Studies of the poem have tended to concentrate on its literary qualities, discrediting its historical value as an account of the siege. In this essay, I build on the work of scholars who view the narrative of Capystranus as a work of fiction, informed by the conventions of crusading romance, rather than as an eyewitness account. However, I reassess the value of Capystranus for the study of war history: I argue that, in its description of the siege, the author pictures accurately the spirit of contemporary warfare. The present essay explores, for the first time, the experiences, images and memories of war as represented in Capystranus, comparing the depiction of warfare to contemporary discourses on the law and ethics of war.

Keywords: Capystranus; Middle English romance; Siege of Belgrade, 1456; fifteenth-century warfare; later crusades

 

Capystranus is a Middle English verse romance devoted to the Siege of Belgrade by the Ottoman Turks in July 1456. The poem was printed three times between 1515 and 1530 by Wynkyn de Worde, and it survives in a fragmentary form, which could, perhaps, testify to its popularity with the audience.1 The poem is anonymous, and it is uncertain whether it was written directly for print or was in circulation for some time before printing. There are chronicle sources, including English ones, that describe the siege, but the poem is based on a variety of sources, which makes it a fascinating source for studying contemporary and early responses to the siege. The present essay will, first, outline the earlier tendencies in English criticism of the poem and suggest new perspectives that highlight the romance’s historical, cultural and literary significance for studying the ways in which the Siege of Belgrade was remembered and imagined in Europe. Second, the essay will trace changes in military practice and ideology that informed the poem and the context in which it was read by early audiences. Finally, I will conduct a series of close readings of the accounts of two sieges described in the poem within its historical context. Comparing the text to other accounts of the 1456 siege and to existing models of crusading romance will help me to assess the role of memory and imagination in the poem.

Introduction

In 1453, the Christian world was shaken by the news that Constantinople had been captured by the Turks. Three years later, in 1456, the successful defense of a less prominent city, Belgrade, revived the hopes of delivering the capital of Eastern Christianity, though these dreams of a new crusade proved ephemeral: Belgrade itself was lost to the enemy in 1521. Meanwhile, the Hungarian victory was of singular importance for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europeans. Norman Housley remarks that “the victory was repeatedly cited in the decades to come as proof that the Ottomans were not invincible.”2 The Middle English poem Capystranus is an important witness to the impression the battle made on Europe, including the inhabitants of England, who were physically distant from the events in East Central Europe.

In what sense does Capystranus engage with memories of the Constantinople and the Belgrade sieges? Study of the processes by which memory works and on the interactions between memory and history by both cognitive psychologists and historians emphasizes the dynamic nature of memory. In many instances, recorded memory is communal rather than personal, a tendency explored in Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire (sites of memory).3 While twentieth-century war memories are in many cases national, medieval memory was often determined through religious affiliation, particularly in the case of “holy wars.” The importance of realms of memory for medieval and post-medieval audiences has been emphasized by Sharon Kinoshita, who discusses Chanson de Roland as a lieu de mémoire.4

J. M. Winter highlights the unstable nature of memory, stating that “the act of recalling the past is a dynamic, shifting process, dependent on notions of future as much as on images of the past.”5 Moreover, contemporary historians draw our attention to the interaction between history and memory: history not only draws on individual and collective memories but also shapes them. Thus, one’s memories of past events are influenced by accounts of the same or similar experiences; this is the case not only in modern times, but also in the Middle Ages. According to Joanna Bourke, “History and memory are not detached narrative structures; at no time in the past was memory ‘spontaneous’ or ‘organic’; at no time has history been able to repudiate its debt to memory and its function in moulding that memory.”6 In this essay, I will consider the interaction between memory and imagination in shaping images of war in Capystranus as a twofold process: while the text may be based on the past accounts, it also influenced future memories and representations of crusading warfare.

Intriguingly, Éva Róna argues that the poem is based on eyewitness accounts; Róna’s hypothesis presents some problems, given that, according to Róna, the poem was composed directly for the press, while the first known edition of the poem is dated to 1515. Róna indicates that contemporary English chronicles refer to the Siege of Belgrade.7 On the other hand, Stephen Shepherd believes that the poem was in circulation prior to its printing. Shepherd points to certain corrupt rhymes and missing lines in the 1515 edition, which could have occurred if the text had existed in manuscript form before it was set for printing by de Worde in 1515.8 Shepherd’s suggestion about the dating of the romance is accepted by Rhiannon Purdie.9 Meanwhile, Bonnie Millar-Heggie is skeptical about Shepherd’s dating, and believes that the poem was written closer to 1515; Millar-Heggie’s dating thus makes the influence of eyewitness accounts on the representation of events more problematic.10 In fact, comparing the representation of the siege in Capystranus and other contemporary and later sources can be helpful in testing both Róna’s suggestion about the incorporation of eyewitness accounts and Shepherd’s early dating of the poem.

After its initial publication in 1515, the poem was reprinted by de Worde in 1527 and in 1530.11 Remarkably, de Worde’s editions are decorated with woodcuts, providing clues to the publisher’s ideas about the attraction of the poem, its target audience and de Worde’s marketing practices. Although de Worde may be simply re-using woodcuts already ordered for his other prints, decorating a text in this way raises the costs of production at the same time as increasing the book’s attractiveness. Leth Seder stresses de Worde’s carefulness in the “selection and placement of illustrative woodcuts” for the anonymous romances he printed.12 Thus, the surviving fragment of de Worde’s 1530 edition is introduced with a woodcut depicting the storming of a town, which, according to J. O. Halliwell, is “exactly similar to one in W. de Worde’s edition of Richard Coeur de Lion, 1528.”13 The woodcut introduces the first of the two sieges described in some detail in Capystranus—the 1453 Siege of Constantinople.

Woodcuts contribute to making Capystranus a popular romance in more than one sense. The romance plays on the current anxieties about the Ottoman threat, and it was commercially successful, judging by the fact that it was reprinted. The survival of only three fragmentary copies may suggest that, like Malory’s Morte Darthur, printed by de Worde’s predecessor William Caxton and later by de Worde himself, the text was, to use A. S. G. Edwards’s expression, “literally read to destruction.”14 However, the rate and condition of survival also indicates the readers’ attitude towards the printed book, an object that was cheaper and less valued than, for instance, the more elaborate illuminated manuscripts. It would be interesting to see how the English audience reacted to the second and third editions of Capystranus after Belgrade fell into Ottoman hands in 1521. Meanwhile, romances dealing with the Siege of Jerusalem remained popular long after the city itself was taken and its delivery became a fantasy.15 Indeed, Anthony Leopold shows that crusading proposals, originally composed for the “leading rulers of Europe as practical plans for the recovery of Jerusalem,” continued to be copied for “enthusiastic nobles” well into the sixteenth century.16 Likewise, Capystranus could have exercised a special, sad or nostalgic attraction after the loss of Jerusalem to the infidels.

Capystranus as Crusading Romance

Studies of the poem have tended to concentrate on its literary qualities, discrediting its historical value as an account of the siege. Millar-Heggie considers the poem to be an “intriguing work that reflects fifteenth-century ideology and fears” and provides an “exhortation to a new crusade.”17 Recently, Lee Manion highlighted the place of Capystranus within the tradition of crusading romance, while acknowledging its originality in focusing on a recent event, which makes the author alter certain romance conventions. According to Manion, “Capystranus recognizably draws on the medieval literary tradition, but the poem’s revisions to that tradition and treatment of a more recent historical event reveal how subsequent early modern texts could discuss crusading subjects critically while modifying the form of the crusading romance.”18 Manion’s discussion of Capystranus, including its use of Biblical tropes and allusions to Charlemagne’s wars, builds on the work of several illustrious scholars of romance. Indeed, Philippa Hardman, Malcolm Hebron, and Diane Vincent consider Capystranus alongside other “siege poems”: they point out that these poems draw on the chanson de geste tradition, alluding to Charlemagne and his exploits against the Turks.19

In his monograph The Medieval Siege, Malcolm Hebron examines a particular group of romances, “siege poems,” that center on a siege as the locus for the confrontation between the “Saracens” and the Christians.20 Grouping together poems that deal with the sieges of Troy, Thebes, Jerusalem, Rhodes and many other cities may obscure the particular context in which each text was produced and the signification of each siege for the audience. However, such an approach highlights the importance of siege in medieval warfare and imagination. The Sege of Melayne, to which Capystranus is usually compared by scholars, depicts an event belonging to the heroic past, the beginning of Charlemagne’s reign.21 Indeed, Hebron claims that, drawing on the tradition of heroic poetry, the Capystranus poet introduces historically inaccurate descriptions of armor and weapons.22 Hebron’s opinion is contested by Millar-Heggie, who points out that “the Christian forces were in fact poorly equipped and outnumbered.”23 Later in this essay, I consider late medieval siege practices and the depiction of the siege in Capystranus, showing that the poet introduces a number of realistic details that would be familiar to his contemporaries. Meanwhile, he also uses motifs that are common in crusading romances, including the enemies’ unnatural cruelty, their exotic appearance and Christian steadfastness.

One of the most prominent features of Capystranus is its hybridity. The poem embraces crusading, hagiographic and historiographical narratives, transforming them through a combination of memory and imagination. In fact, the poem seems to draw on a number of sources, among them oral and written accounts of the Siege of Belgrade, reimagined within the framework of the earlier crusading romance. Vincent comments on the generic fluidity of Capystranus, which stands between romance and chronicle account:

The convergence of the genres of romance and historiography allows Capystranus to imply that Friar Johan Capistranus and Janos Hunyadi, by lifting the Turkish siege of Belgrade, were replaying the opening strains of the same theme of divinely aided Christian triumph over a rival faith and rival civilization.24

Highlighting the symbolic importance of the Siege of Belgrade, the Capystranus author presents the victory as a lieu de mémoire, a conceptual site that may be put to different uses, including political ones.25 Indeed, Vincent emphasizes the Capystranus author’s political awareness and his “exploitation of contemporary religious and political issues.”26 However, in her analysis of the political and religious uses of medieval romance, Vincent seems to underestimate the component of faith, which is particularly important in crusading romances.

In fact, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century authors not only use or, in Vincent’s terms, “exploit” the romance genre to present contemporary political, social and religious challenges in a certain light, but also explore or probe these issues through a kind of “thought experiment.” Raluca Radulescu points out that “romances fulfill the expectations they would tackle the issue of social identity, even though they are not designed to respond to real-life crises but rather provide arenas of discussion where delicate issues may be assessed and debated.”27 Thus, Capystranus engages with several identity issues that were topical in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: Christian identity, warrior identity, including the blurring borderlines between combatants and civilians, and the intersection between Christian, territorial and professional identities.

Identifying the Participants

Embracing Hebron’s category of the “siege poem,” Suzanne Conklin Akbari argues that Capystranus provides one of the last examples of this sub-genre, marking the beginning of a new cultural period in which nascent national identity ousts pan-European Christendom: “the enemy is no longer described in religious terms, as the ‘Saracen,’ but in national terms, as ‘the Turke’”.28 In fact, the enemy is called “Sarasyns” only twice in the text (ll. 140, 158) and is usually designated by the word “Turke(s).” According to Akbari, Capystranus “marks an end point in siege poetry in the crusading tradition,” so that “collective identity” is formulated “in terms of national identity instead of religious affiliation.”29 Meanwhile, it is noteworthy that the enemy is often described in religious terms, such as “hethen houndes” (l. 46), while the author makes no national distinction between “Crysten men” (l. 76), even between the Eastern and the Western Christians. Indeed, the defenders of Constantinople are called “Our Crysten” on more than one occasion (ll. 122, 134, 147, 156). The union between Eastern and Western Churches, proclaimed in 1439 in the Florence cathedral by Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini and Archbishop Bessarion of Nicaea, met with little enthusiasm in Byzantium, yet it may have been symbolically important for the Western Christendom, including the English audience of Capystranus.30

As to the relieving army of Belgrade, Capystranus’s recruits are “Men of diverse countré” (l. 341). Shepherd comments that “Capistrano’s followers consisted mainly of local peasants,” but other historical accounts mention the presence of men from across Europe, who could be mercenaries employed by Hunyadi.31 While, the presence of soldiers from all over Europe during the siege is thus conditioned by the circumstances of mid-fifteenth century warfare, the poet uses their participation for a specific purpose. He evokes the ideal of a united Christendom and highlights Capystranus’s charisma as well as the attraction of his banner with the crucifix:32

 

The Frere with grete devocyon

Bore the baner of Crystes Passyon

Amonge the people all

Dysplayed aborde, grete joye to se,

Men of diverse countré

Fast to hym gan fall. (ll. 337–42)

 

Housley lists among the members of the relieving army of crusaders “Austrians, Germans, Poles, Dalmatians and Bosnians.”33 Meanwhile, modern historians take a bleaker view of Europe’s involvement in the battle than does the Capystranus author. Thus, Pál Fodor states that “At Nándorfehérvár [Belgrade] in 1456 the only help the country’s forces received came from the papal legates and a contingent of about 600 Viennese university students.”34 Indeed, the Capystranus author mentions among the first recruits of the “Frere” students from a university called “Gottauntas” (l. 330), apparently situated in Hungary (there was no such university in Hungary, but the author may be referring to Krakow, which Capistrano visited in 1452).35 Certain contemporary accounts, such as Venetian reports, are skeptical about the quality of Capistrano’s recruits, referring to them condescendingly as “brigna.”36

In the poem, the crusaders’ national identity is specified in the case of two knights who join Capystranus’s army, “Rycharde Morpath, a knight of Englonde, And Syr Johan Blacke […] That was a Turke before” (ll. 354–56). Shepherd notes that the English knight’s identity cannot be verified, adding that “English mercenaries are not known to have participated in the campaign.”37 However, for the English author and his audience the fact that an English knight participated in the famous battle was probably of singular importance. One can imagine the audience rejoicing to hear that

 

Morpath and Blacke Johan

That daye kylled Turkes many one,

Certayne, withouten lette;

There was none so good armoure

That theyr dyntes might endure,

Helme nor bright basynet. (ll. 405–10)

 

At the same time, the readers would sympathize with the plight of the crusaders, who, after a hard and heroic battle, retreat to the city, overcome by the sheer mass of the enemies:

 

Morpath and Blacke Johan

Had woundes many one

That blody were and wyde;

To the towne they flede on fote –

They sawe it was no better bote;

Theyr stedes were slayne that tyde. (ll. 447–52)

 

Remarkably, the author evokes the English knight and the convert “Blacke Johan” together, suggesting perhaps that religious affiliation overcomes national distinctions and contrasting appearances. Shepherd suggests that “Blacke Johan” could have been “a native of Walachia,” a region to the southeast of Hungary under Turkish rule since 1417. Thus, Johan, though a convert, would not have been of a darker complexion than other Hungarian crusaders, and might well have had some Christian background. The poet, however, found it necessary to stress that, although Johan “was a Turke before” (l. 351), “now he is a curteys knight, […] and a wyght, And stedfast in our lore” (ll. 352–54). Miraculously, religious conversion not only bestows chivalric virtue on the former Turk but also ensures his physical strength. While the Capystranus author takes for granted the English Sir Morpath’s valour and piety, he makes an effort to introduce the convert knight as a deserving and steadfast companion. Interestingly, although Sir Morpath and “Blacke Johan” form a pair in the poem, the exploits of “the good Erle Obedyanus” (l. 344) are mentioned separately; apparently, Christian faith and the fact of taking the cross can overcome territorial and cultural divides, but not social boundaries.

In a sense, Christians were warriors by definition, but this warfare was spiritual more often than physical. According to Contamine, “Christianity and war, the church and the military, far from being antithetical, on the whole got on well together.”38 Contamine further explains:

 

If the analogy or comparison between spiritualia and militaria became habitual, it was not simply because the omnipresence of war in medieval life allowed churchmen to be easily understood by their listeners and readers, it was also more profoundly because spiritual life was, for a very long time, compared to a merciless struggle without respite, between the heavenly cohorts and the legions of the devil.39

 

In Capystranus, distinctions between spiritual and physical warfare are partially obscured. Capystranus himself is simultaneously a saint and a soldier. The author declares: “I dare say he was Goddes knight; An holy man was he” (ll. 231–32). Likewise, in other contemporary sources, Hunyadi appears as a hero, heir to the legendary Trojans and almost a saint. The Capystranus author, however, focuses on the former figure, stressing Hunyadi’s obedience (proper to a Christian prince) to the spiritual authority.

Emphasis on Capystranus’s figure and the secondary role accorded to Obedyanus may seem surprising, particularly in view of the fact that, as Thomas Crofts and Robert Allen Rouse maintain, the agenda of the sixteenth-century printed romances is “neither national nor religious but chivalric.”40 However, I would argue that the chivalric ideal these romances promote is simultaneously determined by Christian morality and transformed by changing military ideologies, ethics and practices. Indeed, contemporary chroniclers praise Hunyadi not only for his military exploits but also for his spiritual and, to an extent, feudal, virtues, including loyalty. Antonio Bonfini, in Rerum Ungaricarum Decades, emphasizes that Hunyadi was appointed the captain of Szörényvár (Severin, Romania) and Temesvár (Timişoara, Romania) as a “reward for his loyalty and virtue” and not only for his “heroic deeds.”41

To capture the spirit of the Siege of Belgrade, the Capystranus author draws not only on the conventions of crusading romance, but also on the lived experience of fifteenth-century warfare. The battle scenes would have found particularly strong resonance with the English audience, many of whom would have heard narratives of war told by eyewitnesses or described in romances and chronicles written in the second half of the fifteenth century. As a result, the importance of Capystranus as a narrative of war goes beyond establishing the details of the 1456 Siege of Belgrade. In contrast to previous studies, I stress that the poem is representative of the experience of war in late medieval East Central Europe, where increasing use of new weapons and strategies of warfare led to a shift in attitudes toward warfare and the level of permissible violence. This new experience, and the response it generated, may be at the root of the poem’s popularity on English soil.

Fifteenth-Century Military Ideologies: Contemplating a War

Ideologies of warfare change over time and culture; however, analyzing the notion of war in late medieval French and English written sources, Contamine concludes that there is no break between medieval and modern military ideologies.42 While stressing continuity in the evolution of ideas, institutions, legal frameworks and technologies, Contamine points to certain shifts that took place in people’s opinions and practices related to “proper” ways of conducting a war. Contamine singles out three fundamental ideas about war that emerged in the early and high medieval periods and that continued to be popular in military discourses at the end of the Middle Ages and in the early modern period: war as ordeal, the peace and truce of God and the classification of war into the categories of holy, just and unjust.43

The notion that war was a form of divine ordeal, judicium belli, in which God granted victory to the righteous or simply those who were right in the quarrel, was an attractive idea in medieval chivalric discourse. Meanwhile, the notion of judicium belli had many implications and was not universally accepted throughout the later medieval period. Medieval critics of the judicium belli ideology noted that, by entering this ordeal, the participants challenged God and that victory could be with the stronger and not with the righteous.44 Thus, a leader who sought battle with a superior enemy could lose even if the weaker army was fighting for a good cause. In Capystranus, the Christians defending Constantinople are overcome even though they are led by a pious commander, the Emperor, while the Turks are obviously “untrue.” In fact, section 2 of the poem,45 which in 1527 print is preceded by a woodcut, begins with the words: “Mahamyte,46 that Turke untrue To our Lorde Cryst Jhesu, and to His lawe also” (ll. 58–60).

Moreover, by rashly engaging in battle with a stronger enemy without real necessity, the commander endangered his and his followers’ lives. Such rashness could arise from pride and cause divine chastisement. Alternatively, facing a dreaded enemy against all odds could be interpreted as utter reliance on divine mercy: trusting in God, Capystranus is determined to fight an invincible, uncountable Turkish army. Moreover, in some cases, fighting against a superior enemy is unavoidable: at Constantinople and Belgrade, the Christians have no choice other than defending the city or surrendering it to the infidels.

Military defeat of the side which has a “just” cause can be construed as divine punishment for sins, such as luxuria and pride. In fact, there is no need for a particular sin to be apparent, as God can inflict suffering in order to lead the faithful to salvation. Contamine notes that the notion of war as ordeal did not disappear entirely from people’s consciousness in the late medieval and early modern periods: “Dieu n’entendait pas récompenser les vainqueurs, reconnaître publiquement leur bon droit, mais punir les vaincus pour leurs moeurs, leur conduit, leurs péchés. Ainsi expliquait-on l’échec des croisades.”47 Victory was a sign of divine election, but defeat could also be a form of God’s favour, in as much as it brought about moral reform and spiritual conversion. In this respect, Capystranus represents an ideal turn of events: the Christians are defeated and martyred at Constantinople, but they emulate Christ, who suffered on the Cross in order to redeem mankind and rose to heaven, as the poet reminds the audience at the beginning of the romance. This purgation is effected by pagans, who appear as idolatrous, savage and almost demonic creatures. In response, Christendom rallies, and God’s knight, Johan Capystranus, blessed by the Pope, leads his followers (priests and schoolmasters), Prince Obedyanus, an English knight and a Turkish convert to triumph.

The role of Obedyanus is, as his name indicates, to comply with Capystranus’s orders, albeit the author of the poem depicts the prince as an exceptionally brave leader. Indeed, Obedience is one of the virtues required of a soldier for the success of a military campaign. Strictly speaking, Obedyanus is subordinated, not to Capystranus, but to Christ himself, because Capystranus chooses as the commander of his army, his “capytayne” (l. 289), “A baner of Crystes Passyon” (l. 283) together with the papal “bull of leed” (l. 291). Interestingly, writing about an event that took place exactly sixty years before the battle of Belgrade, the Turkish victory at Nicopolis, Philippe de Mézières states that “in all military plans and directions since the beginning of wars in this world, four moral virtues have been necessary […] that is Rule, Knightly Discipline, Obedience and Justice.”48 Thus, Obedyanus incarnates the key soldierly virtues that were important both in the late Middle Ages and early modern period; his mastery of one virtue, obedience, implies the presence of rule, discipline and justice as well.49 The true hero of the romance, however, is Capystranus, whose achievement is also presented as re-enacting, albeit on a smaller scale, Christ’s victory over death. Indeed, the poem includes one episode, discussed further in the essay, where the dead literally rise up in response to Capystranus’s audacious prayer.

However, in order to confirm his legitimacy as a crusade preacher, Capystranus needs a papal bull. While crusading was a legitimate form of warfare by definition, the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period witnessed renewed debate on the distinction between “just” and “unjust” war. It seems that, from the fifteenth century onwards, a “just” war was to be conducted in a “just” fashion, while the “guerre guerroyable” designated merciless, at times unprincipled, warfare. These considerations would have influenced the Capystranus author, who stresses the contrast between Christian and Saracen ways of conducting war. Naturally, the description of Turkish atrocities builds on the long-standing tradition of chanson de geste. Moreover, Constantinople was actually subjected to severe marauding by the Ottoman army, a fact that must have been known across Europe. Less well known, and certainly less popular among the western Christians, was the fact that Sultan Mehmed was bound by the Islamic law to allow his soldiers to do their will and that looting was promptly stopped. The Capystranus poet, indeed, leaves the impression that the Turks continued to murder Christians and commit all possible acts of violence long after the defeat. His description has much in common with scenes from European wars as depicted in chronicles, including both the Hundred Years War and the War of Roses, when the armies showed few scruples about burning and despoiling churches, towns and villages.

The Ottoman violence in Capystranus serves another important function: it brings to the fore the contrast between Christians and the infidels, rendering the latter almost inhumane and animalistic, if not downright demonic, figures. Indeed, scholars of crusading romances and chanson de geste have argued that animal imagery, often associated with violence and predatory behavior, could be viewed as both harmful and beneficial, associated with the devil and God. Thus, the Saracens are clearly devil’s servants and subjects, and they go directly to hell, as the Capystranus author does not fail to remind the audience. The pagans are akin to dogs, even producing canine noises, such as howling and barking. At the same time, Jacques Voisenet persuasively demonstrates that subjection to animal attacks often appears as corollary to salvation not only in devotional and homiletic literature but also in romances.50 Indeed, the Christians murdered by the Saracens at Constantinople and Belgrade are destined to heaven: they are participants in “holy” and “just” warfare, who defend their native soil in a legitimate, chivalric and “just” manner, which is a necessary condition of legitimate war in the eyes of late medieval and early modern philosophers.

Changes in ideological attitudes towards war went in hand with the evolution of military technologies and political institutions. Increasing use of gunpowder, professionalization of armies and centralization of the state apparatus contributed to the evolution of ideas about war. As all of the population became, at least theoretically, involved in war, not only through joining the army, but also through contributing to the military effort by paying taxes and supplying provisions, distinctions between combatants and non-combatants began to blur. In Capystranus, the participation of priests and schoolmasters in the Siege of Belgrade reflects their active role as “God’s knights” as well as the fact that they were no longer immune to military violence. Not only do they celebrate mass, as was customary before battle, but, not content to stay “behind the lines,” they engage in hand-to-hand fighting. There is a disquieting contrast between the language and ritual of Christian service, including the words and gestures associated with peace (pax or the kiss of peace) and the priests’ hardy offensive:

 

Many a .m. of preestes there was;

The Turkes herde never suche a masse

As they harde that daye!

Our preestes Te Deum songe;

The hethen fast downe they donge –

Then pax was put awaye! (ll. 417–22)

 

Again, the image of fighting priests may relate the audience back to certain chansons de geste in the Charlemagne tradition, but it also brings to mind actual situations in which clerics had to resist the attacks of marauders or, increasingly, of the Church reformers.

Thus, while retaining notions about war that originated in the Early and High Middle Ages (including war as ordeal, peace and truce of God, holy, just and unjust war), late medieval people reinterpreted war in relation to the new political, economic and social realities. Not all of these changes are equally applicable to the Siege of Belgrade in 1456 and the narrative of this event in Capystranus, yet it is worthwhile to bear them in mind while analyzing the Siege of Belgrade as remembered and imagined in Capystranus.

Experiencing a Siege

Douglas Gray, in considering the Morte Darthur, which was written some years after the fall of Constantinople and the Siege of Belgrade, comments on the growing importance of siege warfare in the late Middle Ages.51 Likewise, Contamine indicates that, while “siege mentality” was characteristic of the entire medieval military culture, the introduction of artillery at the beginning of the fifteenth century marks a turning point in both the technology of war and contemporary mentalities.52 Changes in siege warfare at the end of the Middle Ages found reflection in both chivalric romances and in military treatises.53 Thus, authors of the latter treatises often copied and even modernised the texts of classical authors, such as Vegetius, in the sections that deal with sieges. The advice of classical authors, in fact, was already dated in this period, when the spread of firearms in besieging fortified towns and castles led to the development of new types of fortification and the introduction of firearms as part of the regular town defense accoutrements. In both Constantinople and Belgrade, the Ottomans deployed considerable gunpowder resources, but the defenders, too, had some firearms, which in the case of Constantinople proved highly inadequate.

A number of historians, both medieval and modern, attribute the fall of Constantinople to the superiority of the Ottoman artillery. On the basis of the “western and the Turkish sources,” Halil İnalcik concludes that “the eventual success of the Ottomans came chiefly as the result of two events: the breaching of the walls by the Ottoman artillery bombardment, and the disputes which arose between the Byzantines and the Latins defending the city.”54 Summarising the outcome of the siege, the Capystranus author observes: “Thus is Constantyne the noble cyté wonne, Beten donne with many a gonne, And Crysten people slayne” (ll. 207–10). Unsurprisingly, Capystranus is silent on the supposed discord of the Christian defenders, who seem to present unified resistance to the enemy. In fact, the author begins the account of the siege when the Turks are already inside the city, avoiding the delicate issues of crusader identity and co-operation before and during the siege. As the Turks enter the city, allegedly taking no prisoners, desecrating churches, slaying women, children and priests at mass, the Christians, seeing nothing but death before them, fight heroically:

 

The Crysten saw that they sholde dye,

And on theyr maystres layde hande quycly

And faught a wele good spede:

Every prysoner then on lyve

Kylled of the Turkes foure or five;

To helle theyr soules yede.

Or our prysoners after were take;

Many a Turke they made blake. (ll. 108–15)

This description is followed by a series of three episodes, where “Macamyte” cries to his “god” (“Mahounde”), to rally his wavering ranks. The Christians combat the Turks valiantly, even killing five thousand Turks at a time (l. 126) and subsequently felling eighty thousand enemies (l. 141). However, the defenders are too few, the Turks are continuously entering the city and the Christians are eventually defeated.

The above brief summary of the siege reveals that, although the description of the fall of Constantinople in Capystranus draws on the existing literary tradition, recycling common tropes of crusading romances and chanson de geste, it is neither entirely fantastic nor deprived of literary force. The series of battles in which the Christians kill an increasing number of the Turks and are finally overridden and dispersed describe, with certain realism, skirmishes that would have taken place on the streets. According to Inalcik, “The Ottoman army entered the city through a large breach made by bombardment in the wall. Emperor Constantine was killed in hand-to-hand combat.”55 Battles within the city walls, with the Christians crying to God and the Ottomans to the prophet render the atmosphere of the event in a way that would have been easily grasped by the fifteenth-century audience.

At the same time, the episodes in which the Turkish leader appeals to Mahomet and meets Christian response are symbolic. There are three such episodes, and after the last in the series the Christians are physically overcome, but seem to score a spiritual victory:

 

He [Macamyte] cryed on Mahounde as he wolde braste,

Our Crysten on Jhesu cryed faste,

That all the worlde wrought. (ll.146–48)

 

Although the Christians subsequently flee and most of them are killed, it happens because of God’s will and not through the supposed superiority of the Turks. Indeed, the Christians’ invocation of Christ, the creator of the world, is steadfast and almost serene, in contrast to the Turkish wild cry to their false “god.” The author speaks of the Turkish victory with resignation, apparently humbling himself before divine will:

 

 

Alas, saufe Crysten wyll of heven,

Our Crysten were made uneven

With a false company –

For of the Turkes and Sarasyns kene,

An .c. were, withouten wene,

Agaynst one of our meny! (ll. 155–60)

 

There is certainly no shame in losing a battle if the Turks number a thousand to one Christian. Indeed, the defenders of Constantinople were heavily outnumbered (though not so fantastically) and exhausted by the siege. The Christians lose their earthly holy city, yet they gain the heavenly Jerusalem. However, the Capystranus author appears to imply that, had it been God’s will, the Christians would have won even against great odds, preparing the audience for the miraculous delivery of Belgrade.

The description of the Siege of Belgrade, given in sections IV and V (ll. 360–579) of the poem as it survives, is far more detailed than that of Constantinople. There are structural and narrative similarities as well as differences in the description of the sieges. First, while the Siege of Constantinople begins in medias res, following a prologue that evokes Christ’s sacrifice and Charlemagne’s exploits, most of sections III and IV describe the Christian preparations for the crusade. The author may have relied on the audience having at least some notion of the events that led to the siege of Constantinople, in much the same way as he expected them to be familiar with Charlemagne’s “crusades.” It is possible that the English audience knew less about the Siege of Belgrade, and the romance’s author certainly wanted to highlight the role of his hero, Capystranus, in securing the Pope’s blessing for the holy war and assembling an army. In fact, Shepherd notes that Capystranus’s negotiations with the Pope are conflated with the dealings of Cardinal Juan Carvajal, who resided in Buda in 1455 and was delegated by Pope Calixtus III to prepare a crusade in Hungary, Poland and Germany. The historical St. John of Capistrano preached a holy war in Hungary under Carvajal’s supervision.56

However, Carvajal is not mentioned in the poem. Indeed, the Pope’s words “Thou prechest Goddes words wyde In the countree, on every syde, In many a diverse lande” (ll. 268–70) are equally applicable to Capistrano, whose efforts at preaching a crusade were not limited to Hungary, but extended across Europe. According to certain sources, Capistrano managed to rally 60,000 crusaders, though Shepherd explains that “many fewer probably showed up than had agreed to.”57 The poem’s author gives a more modest figure: at the beginning of the crusade, Capystranus recruits “Syxe and twenty .m.” [26,000] (l. 332) from the mysterious university of “Gottauntas” (l. 329). All recruits are clerics, and most of them are ordained priests. Later, Capystranus and Obedyanus arrive at Belgrade with “.xx. thousande” (l. 360): apparently, 6,000 of crusaders never made it to the city. Meanwhile, the remaining 20,000 have evolved from a motley crowd of students and priests Capystranus must have picked at the university into a splendid army, “In helme and hauberc bryght” (l. 363).

The number 20,000 in relation to the Christian army is cited four times in the poem. At the height of battle, the Turks kill as many at the bridge that leads to the citadel, naturally an important target for both attackers and defenders: “Twenty thousande of our men Were borne downe at the brydge ende, The Turkes were so thro” (ll. 438–40). The author’s emotional involvement is evident: the defenders are not only “our Crysten,” as they are in the description of the Constantinople siege, they are “our men.” The Turks are finally recognized as deserving adversaries, who win not only because there are more of them but also because they are “so thro.” A narrow bridge is just the place where numerical superiority of the attackers can be offset by the defenders’ courage and professionalism, so the Capystranus author explains the Christian losses and withdrawal as a result of the Turks’ ferocity and their exotic appearance. Fresh reinforcements riding on camels overrun both horses and riders: “Dromydaryes over them ranne And kylled downe bothe horse and man” (ll. 441–42). Finally, following Capystranus’s prayer, “Twenty .m.” (ll. 516 and 528) arise from the dead and attack the Turks, driving them out of the city.

The army led by Obedyanus and Capystranus would have been reinforced by the city garrison, but the 20,000 repeatedly given by the Capystranus author provides the poem with narrative unity and makes the details unusually specific for a genre that is notoriously hostile to “realism.”58 While the number of Christians is settled and finite, the Turks attacking Belgrade present an amorphous, shapeless mass, with reinforcement continuously flowing in. Thus, Capystranus announces to the Pope the news that the “Turke,” whose aim is to conquer Hungary, departed for Belgrade “With two hundred .m. [200,000] this same day” (l. 253).59 The Christians are thus outnumbered 1:10, which is an entirely manageable ratio within the universe of chivalric romance. Accordingly, during the Siege of Constantinople, the Christians slay five thousand infidels in no time, albeit the Christian losses are not mentioned: “Anone, within a lytell throwe, Five .m. Turkes on a rowe In the stretes lay slayne” (ll. 125–27). Using much the same words, the poet tells how, at Belgrade, the first encounter between the armies resulted in five thousand dead, presumably Turkish: “Anone they togyder mette: Five .m. deed withouten lette, In helme and hauberk bryght” (ll. 390–93). Moreover, Obedyanus kills every enemy he meets, while Morpath and Blacke Johan likewise “kylled Turkes many one” (l. 406). Had it not been for the new division, counting “A .c. thousande and mo” (l. 431), in bright new armor and mounted on fearful dromedaries, one has the feeling the poem would have been much shorter and devoid of its high point, Capystranus’s prayer and the subsequent miracle.

In fact, the impression of historiographical precision and veracity in referring to numbers of the armies, artillery pieces, kinds of armor worn by the fighters and the animals they ride results in offsetting the disconcerting miracle resulting from Capystranus’s prayer. On the other hand, accounts of miracles worked by saints filed for the purposes of canonization had to be very detailed and verifiable. Although St. John of Capistrano was officially canonized only in 1727, he was regarded as a saint by his contemporaries.60 Thus, the poem’s author may be drawing on the formal requirements for miracle and hagiographic narratives in providing the level of detail for the romance.

As I have mentioned before, the structures of the two siege narratives in Capystranus display both similarities and differences. Both siege accounts are structured as series of battles, either within or outside the city walls. In both cases, the Christians kill many enemies, but must finally withdraw before a larger and fresher army. The battle episodes in the Constantinople siege are punctuated by the Sultan’s outcries to his “god,” the last of which is apparently answered. The Christians flee, though the audience would know that the Christians are defeated through God’s will and enjoy the better part of becoming martyrs, their souls going straight to heaven, while the Turks are hell-bound. No individual Christians are mentioned in the first account, and the Emperor’s name appears only in the narrative of his martyrdom. Clearly, there were no charismatic or at least able leaders at Constantinople, and here the Capystranus author and modern historians are of one mind.

By contrast, “Macamyte” does not appear at any point after the siege of Constantinople. The enemy is referred to collectively, “the Turke,” while the Christian army includes several prominent individuals (Capystranus, Obedyanus, Morpath and Blacke Johan) as well as being socially stratified: there are knights, clerics, further divided into priests and schoolmasters, and, apparently, regular soldiers. The author even distinguishes between the ways in which priests and schoolmasters fight: the former enter the battle singing Te Deum, and the latter deal severe punishment to those who “wolde not lere theyr laye” (l. 425). At the end, Capystranus proves himself a true “God’s knight” and a good leader of his men.

Like Macamyte during the Siege of Constantinople, Capystranus turns to God at the critical moment. In contrast to the Turk’s animalistic, savage yells to his “god,” the saint’s prayers are long and elaborate, addressing his spiritual “overlord” in feudal terms. Interestingly, Capystranus’s prayer offers parallels not only to Macamyte’s yells but also to Emperor’s words in response to the Turks’ requirements of abandoning God. The Emperor answers with a praise to God, urging the Turks themselves to convert; he prefers to be tortured and put to death rather than commit apostasy. 61 Surprisingly, Capystranus actually threatens Christ and Mary that he will abandon them unless the Christians are granted victory. In historical accounts of the siege, Capistrano’s prayer is mentioned, but then he beseeches God’s mercy rather than demands a miracle. Philippa Hardman notes the parallel between this episode and Turpin’s outburst in the Sege of Melayne, stating that both can be related to the “popular story cycles of the ‘miracles of the Virgin,’” “where a devotee of the Virgin rebukes her for failing to prevent some catastrophe, after which Mary miraculously reverses the disaster”62 Unlike Turpin, however, Capystranus addresses both God and the Virgin. His prayer also parallels and contrasts with the response of the Emperor of Constantinople to the Turks earlier in the poem, when the Emperor celebrates the power of Christ and Mary.

At the same time, Capystranus’s prayer is far from incongruous within a chivalric romance. The author prepares the audience for the prayer already from the beginning, when he calls Capystranus “Goddes knyght” (l. 230). A knight has to obey his lord, but can demand, in return, the lord’s protection. In feudal terms, a knight has obligations to those under his charge as well, and, being ultimately answerable to the overlord for his subjects’ well-being, a knight can in turn require the lord’s provisions and defense for the knight’s retinue. Feudal obligations are mutual, not unilateral. Although by the end of the Middle Ages feudal obligations as constructed in chivalric romance were already obliterated, if ever they existed in practice in exactly this way, the ideology of chivalry persisted well into the sixteenth century. In full knowledge that he has performed his obligations well, that he fights for a just cause, as proved by the papal bull, and that he follows the only true commander, Christ, who is depicted on the banner, Capystranus utters what may seem to a modern reader a surprising, if not downright blasphemous, prayer.

The miracle is granted: as far as Capystranus’s voice is heard, the dead rise up. Shepherd comments that Capystranus’s reputation as healer and his enthusiastic encouragement of the troops throughout the battle would have contributed to the account. As twenty-first century readers, we need rationalizations to make sense of a miracle in a “realistic” poem, complete with numbers, descriptions of artillery pieces and arms and names of participants, many of them identifiable historical figures. However, medieval and early modern audiences lived in a culture where miracles were “commonplace,” not only as part of romances and saints’ lives, but also in everyday life and, particularly, in accounts of crusades.63

Is the story of the miracle wrought by Capystranus an instance of memory, transferred through oral accounts, or imagination? If it is the latter, then whose imagination – the Capystranus author’s, his eyewitnesses’ or even the collective imagination of the battle participants? In late-fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century culture, where religion and war were closely intertwined, the account of a miracle becomes part of collective memory. This collective memory persists into modern culture: the bells ringing on the day of St. John of Capistrano to commemorate a victoria mirabilis is an example of a lieu de mémoire, to which the Middle English poem Capystranus is an early witness.

Conclusion

Nora writes that “memory has never known more than two forms of legitimacy: historical and literary.”64 In the case of memory realms, historical and literary linearities converge, and, like certain other medieval texts, Capystranus marks a point of their convergence. I believe that the poem was popular in the sixteenth century, occasioning de Worde’s three printings, because it combined memory and imagination in the account of a recent landmark in crusading warfare. It would be reductive to read the poem only as an example of political propaganda, because memory realms emerge only when there is “a will to remember.”65 The Capystranus author draws skillfully on contemporary anxieties about the advance of the representatives of hostile culture and faith into Europe, a theme topical even in modern popular culture. He also uses familiar tropes and stereotypes from crusading romance—the Saracens’ cruelty and animalism, the Christians’ unity and steadfastness—though he presents these so as to evoke familiar experiences of war. In this essay, I have shown how the commonplaces of crusading romance were not only relevant in the context of fifteenth-century crusading warfare, but also in the context of “domestic” European warfare. New ideologies and technologies of war are related to the old ones in Capystranus: reading a poem, the audience would have the impression of a double déjà vu—that of reading old romances and that of remembering recent wars, in England and elsewhere in Europe.

Scholars of medieval and early modern English literature tend to consider Capystranus as a “siege poem” or alongside other crusading romances focusing on a siege (Shepherd, Hebron, Hardman and others). Such an approach is fruitful, yet it underestimates the poem’s involvement with two recent historical events, the sieges of Constantinople and Belgrade. Complementing the former approach, another critical tendency is to view the poem functioning as political propaganda, highlighting contemporary threats in the Mediterranean and East Central Europe and consequently shifting the audience’s attention from domestic tensions to international affairs. Elements of crusading romance, chronicle and political propaganda in the poem can be best understood if the poem is discussed within the framework of lieux de mémoire, commemorating miraculous delivery of Belgrade through the offices of Johan Capystranus.

Material, functional and symbolic elements of a memory site are all reflected in the poem. The material element is brought to the fore through references to a concrete place, up-to-date military technology (guns and mortars), ideologies and practices (war as ordeal of purgation, involvement of non-combatants and emphasis on the “right,” Christian way of warfare). Functionally, the poem is designed to promote more active involvement in wars against the Turks in East Central Europe and boost Christian morals. Symbolically, the poem’s author relates the Siege of Belgrade to events of Biblical and mythical history (the exodus, crucifixion, Charlemagne’s wars). Memory and imagination are intertwined in the poem: based on chronicles, oral narratives and eyewitness accounts, the poem is shaped by earlier narratives about similar events, influencing, in turn, future memories.

 

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Suzana Miljan and Hrvoje Kekez

The Memory of the Battle of Krbava (1493) and the Collective Identity of the Croats

The article deals with the construction of the narrative of the battle of Krbava Field, where many Croatian noblemen perished in 1493. The accounts of the battle began to spread immediately after the fighting had come to an end, giving rise to various versions of the events. The second part of the article is devoted to the rhetoric of the various retellings with which the memory of the calamity was preserved from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century. The article then examines the circumstances leading to the increase in the political and social importance of the narrative in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. The final part of the article focuses on the history of the narrative of the battle within the framework of the various Croatian state formations of the twentieth century.

Keywords: Kingdom of Hungary and Croatia, Battle of Krbava, Ottoman expansion, social memory, collective identity of Croats

Introduction

On September 9, 1493, the military contingent led by Ban Emeric Derencsényi of Croatia suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of the Ottoman army on Krbava Field in present-day central Croatia. The long-lasting defensive war waged by the Kingdoms of Hungary and Croatia against the Ottomans became one of the formative factors of the collective identity of Croats in the early modern period, as well as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More than 300 years of continuous armed conflicts with the Ottomans provoked the interest of both contemporaries and modern historians. Therefore, in this article we will examine how narratives of the battle of Krbava were created, tracing writings ranging from fifteenth-century accounts to works of modern scholarship. The main questions will concern how the story was transferred, where, and why, with special emphasis on the issue of when the narratives were created and used in the construction of a collective Croatian identity.

The Battle of Krbava—A Historical Overview

Although there were some sporadic Ottoman raids on Croatia and Slavonia before the middle of the fifteenth century, Croatian lands did not become a main target of Ottoman military and political strategy until the fall of the medieval Kingdom of Bosnia in 1463. The events that preceded the battle of Krbava include the conquering of most of the Bosnian towns and castles (including the royal city of Jajce), the death of King Stephen Tomašević of Bosnia, and the foundation of the Jajce and Srebrenica Banats, followed by the Senj Captaincy in 1469 under the rule of the King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary.1

In subsequent decades, the Ottoman raids continued, and in the early spring of 1493 Hadum Jakub-pasha gathered his army in order to raid Croatian and Austrian lands once again.2 In the very beginning of his campaign, Jakub-pasha besieged Jajce in central Bosnia, but he very quickly abandoned this attempt and continued his raids in central Slavonia and Styria. At the same time, dissatisfied with the royal politics of King Wladislas II Jagiellon of Hungary, Count Hans (Anž) Frankapan of Brinje and Count Charles Kurjaković of Krbava rose up against the king. The Frankapani wanted to recover their castles in the County of Vinodol and the city of Senj, a very important port on the northern Adriatic. These cities and estates had earlier been confiscated by King Matthias. Similarly, Count Charles Kurjaković wanted to regain Obrovac, one of the most important emporia on the Zrmanja River.

Very soon after he received news that rebels had besieged the royal city of Senj, king Wladislas sent Bans Emeric Derencsényi and John Both of Bajna at the head of an army to crush the rebellion. The bans decided to direct their campaign towards the estates of Count Hans Frankapan, so they besieged Hans’ castle of Brinje. Meanwhile, they received news that Jakub-pasha has plundered the areas around the Modruš castle and that he had burned outlying settlements to the ground. Without hesitation, Ban Emeric Derencsényi invited rebels to join him in the ensuing battle against the Ottomans and granted them royal pardon. The majority of the Croatian noblemen who had participated in the uprising decided to accept this proposal, with the exceptions of Hans Frankapan and Charles Kurjaković, who very soon died, most probably because of wounds that were inflicted during the battle around the Brinje castle. The accusation that Count Hans Frankapan invited Ottomans to help him in his campaign against Ban Emeric Derencsényi cannot be dismissed beyond any doubt, and that may be why he did not join the Christian army.

Nevertheless, Ban Emeric Derencsényi and Croatian noblemen slowly gathered their army on Krbava Field below the Udbina castle. According to the surviving written testimonies, Jakub-pasha initiated negotiations for free passage to his strongholds in Bosnia. The ban rejected this proposal, most probably because he wanted to demonstrate the power of the Ban’s army (i.e. the royal army) in a battle with the Ottomans on the open field. The goal of this decision was also to prevent any future collaboration between Croatian noblemen and the Ottomans or the Venetians. Although the Croatian army outnumbered Jakub-pasha’s army, the Ottomans had more cavalry and their army was composed of experienced soldiers. Knowing this, and having experience in conflicts with the Ottomans, Count John Frankapan of Cetin encouraged the ban to trap the Ottomans in one of the numerous passes in the area, but the ban rejected this suggestion and arranged his army on the open field below the Udbina castle.

The battle began with an Ottoman decoy and did not last long. Jakub-pasha had sent some of his troops to surround the Croatian army and attack them from behind. The decoy was very successful, and the left wing of the Croatian army, consisting primarily of the infantry led by Count Bernardin Frankapan, was annihilated. Very soon, the rest of the Croatian army was destroyed. Although the Ottoman victory was complete, Jakub-pasha hastened his army to leave the area and went back to Bosnia. The Ottomans took only the most important noblemen as prisoners to be ransomed, while the rest were slaughtered.

Although the Croatian defeat at the battle of Krbava Field in 1493 was devastating, it should be noted that the Ottomans did not occupy the county of Krbava, because it is situated far from the Bosnian border, and it was conquered only some 30 years later, in 1527.3 The explanation for this may lie in the political and military strategy of the Ottoman Empire, which at the time was concerned more with the Pannonian basin, i.e. Hungary, than Croatia.4 Nevertheless, the battle had two important consequences. First, the defeat at Krbava Field accelerated the emigration of the inhabitants of Krbava and neighboring areas into safer regions.5 Second, the great loss of members of the leading Croatian noble families in the battle of Krbava Field was a severe blow to contemporary society. The noblemen were missed not only by their own families, but also as organizers of the defense of the Croatian lands against the Ottoman threat. This loss of an important element of the Croatian defense forces was clearly a factor in the subsequent events of the wars against the Ottomans and in the everyday life of the kingdom.

The Spread of News Immediately after the Battle

Immediately after the battle, news of the disastrous defeat at Krbava Field spread not only in the neighboring areas within the Kingdom of Hungary, but also beyond its borders. Accounts of the dramatic events of the conflict were presented in the most important political centers of contemporary Europe by various political emissaries and figures, such as the Counts of the Frankapani or Kurjakovići families. News also spread quickly among the lower strata of society in medieval Croatia and its neighboring lands.

An anonymous short record of the battle composed in September 1493 (that is, immediately after the battle) survives.6 In all likelihood it was written by Count Hans Frankapan of Brinje personally, who, unlike his kinsmen, decided not to participate in the battle. It was originally written in Latin, but it is extant in a mid-sixteenth-century German translation, and it was probably sent to Emperor Maximilian I Habsburg in order to inform him of the events on Krbava Field. The author of the record knew the exact date of the battle, described the leaders of the army, gave the almost exact numbers of the participants, and, finally, underlined the severity of the defeat.

Pope Alexander VI also received information concerning the battle very soon after the event. Only four days after the battle, Antonio Fabregues, a papal envoy who permanently lived in Senj and whose permanent mission was to collect information about the Ottomans in Croatia, sent his rather long report to the Roman Curia.7 He described the battle in detail on the basis of an account of a cavalryman who managed to escape. Another, substantially more vivid and upsetting account of the battle was sent to Pope Alexander VI by Bishop George Divnić of Nin.8 After he had personally visited Krbava Field, Divnić wrote the pope an extensive letter, typical for contemporary diplomacy, dated September 27, 1493. In his letter the bishop emphasized the danger of the Ottoman threat and stressed that they had easy access to Italy because of the destruction of the nobility in parts of Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia and Pannonia (meaning Hungary).

Certainly, news of the capture of Ban Emeric Derencsényi and the great defeat of the Croatian army soon reached the royal court in Buda. The writings of Antonio Bonfini, the official chronicler of King Matthias and his successor, King Wladislas II Jagiellon, indicate that the royal court was well informed of the calamity. In his book Rerum Hungaricum decades, Bonfini provides an even more detailed account of the Krbava Field battle.9 Bonfini described the movements of both armies, before and during the battle, but his writing is rather partial because of his personal and royal agenda. King Wladislas II was angry at Count Bernardin Frankapan because the rebellion that had preceded the battle.10 Nevertheless, Bonfini’s writing was often used as a source for subsequent royal and other chronicles in their presentations of the battle.

News of the Krbava battle spread rapidly within the Holy Roman Empire in large part because of the circulation of a leaflet published by Johann Winterburger in Vienna in the autumn of 1493.11 Therefore, it is not surprising that it was one of the topics at the summit held after the funeral of the Emperor Frederick III in Vienna in December 1493.12

Other political centers of contemporary Europe were mostly informed about the battle of Krbava Field by papal diplomacy. Several letters were sent by Pope Alexander VI to various European royal courts,13 including the one to King Henry VII Tudor of England, who in his response (January 12, 1494) emphasized his concern for Croatia, which was suffering the Ottoman raids, and also underlining the danger for neighboring countries, especially Italy.14

News of the disastrous defeat at Krbava Field spread rather quickly among the people in Croatia. A few days after the battle, accounts of the events were very well-known among the residents of the coastal city of Senj. As noted above, the news was apparently spread by a cavalryman, hence news of the battle had reached Senj just a couple of days after the event.

News of the battle reached the city of Zadar, the most important seaport on the eastern Adriatic coast, very quickly. Two accounts recorded by two pilgrims traveling with a larger group to the Holy Land make mention of the Krbava battle. Due to the significant differences between the two, one could argue that they used different sources, although they traveled with the same group of pilgrims.15 Jan Hasišteinsky, the pilgrim from Bohemia, wrote in his travelogue Putování k Svatému hrobu [The Pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre] about how he had heard the story about the battle from a nobleman from the county of Lika. That anonymous lesser nobleman had underlined the misfortunes of the local inhabitants and had emphasized that he had lost several of his kinsmen in the battle.16 Heinrich von Zedlitz, a knight from Silesia, did not name his source, but he emphasized the atmosphere of mourning in Zadar because of the devastating defeat on Krbava Field, a place only one day on horseback from the city.17 Other pilgrims described a similar atmosphere of fear of new Ottoman raids in subsequent years, for instance Konrad von Parsberg in 149418 and Hans Schürpfen in 1497.19 Yet, it is best recorded in the account of Martinac, the parish priest of Grobnik, written in 1494.20 Priest Martinac had compared that fear with the atmosphere that existed during the time of the raids of Mongols, Huns and Goths.21 He was emotional about the event, because he was a member of the Lapčani kindred and his kinsmen have participated in the battle, from whom he most likely gained the information.

Rumors of the catastrophic defeat at Krbava Field spread rather fast among contemporaries, becoming familiar to people across vast areas of land. It is therefore not surprising that an anonymous chronicler of the orthodox monastery in Cetinje, Montenegro, briefly recorded the event of the Krbava battle in the monastery’s annals: Pljeni Jagu-paša Harvate i bana Derenžula živa uhvati na Krbave.22 A similar record in German is found in the annals of the Franciscan monastery in Thann in Alsace in the Holy Roman Empire: 9. Septemb. wurde unser christliche Armée in Orient, auf den libernicensischen Feldern, von den Türckhen geschlagen und seind bey 5000 Mann tod geblieben.23

The Narratives of the Battle of Krbava in Folk Poetry and High Literature

The news of the battle of Krbava spread rapidly in areas inhabited by the Croats in the late fifteenth century. The story of how the noble Christian knights and the leaders of the Croatian army had fallen in the battle against the infidels and how they had been slaughtered while fighting in the defense of Christendom had a significant impact on the common people and on members of the educated classes. Various stories and poems were presumably composed soon after the calamity in which the battle of Krbava was presented as one of the cornerstones in the long defensive war of the Croats against the Ottomans. These stories and poems most probably circulated among the common people for centuries before being written down in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

One of the first recorded folk poems about the Krbava battle is “Ban Derenčin boja bije” [Ban Derencsényi Fighting the Fight], which was put in writing by Paul Ritter Vitezović, a famous Croatian polyhistor, in 1682.24 In the poem, Krbava is presented as a mythical place where the voices and traces of fallen Croatian noblemen could be still found. The poem also vividly shows how even centuries later the names of the noblemen where still known to the population of the region. However, it should be noted that the title of the poem is a clear allusion to the Bible, since it paraphrases the words of St. Paul: “I have fought a good fight, ... I have kept my faith” (2 Tim 4, 7).

Another folk poem on the Krbava battle was recorded in the middle of the eighteenth century in the Dubrovnik area. It was the poem entitled “Kako je Hodžulo, ban skradinski, poginuo sa ostalim Skradinjanima” [How Hodžulo, the ban of Skradin, perished together with his Skradinians]. It was first published in printed form by Baltazar Bogišić in 1878.25 However, he did not realize that it deals with the Krbava battle. After conducting a detailed linguistic and onomastic analysis, in the 1930s Ante Šimičik argued persuasively that the poem actually concerns the battle of Krbava Field.26 The poem vividly shows how the narratives of the battle had a very important place in the anti-Ottoman narrative and how, after a couple of centuries of circulation of the narratives among the people, many details had been lost, but the importance of the battle remained.

Friar Andrija Kačić Miošić, the guardian of the Franciscan convent in Zastrog near Makarska, played a significant role in preserving a narrative of the Krbava battle. He composed a narrative entitled “Razgovor ugodni naroda Slovinskoga: pismarica starca Milovana” [A Leisurely Conversation of the Slavic Folk: A Song Book of the Old Man Milovan] in the manner of traditional folk poetry in 1756. Kačić wanted to present Croatian and South Slavic history (mostly in the period of wars against the Ottomans), so he wrote 136 poems in the typical folk rhyme (deseterac) in order to ensure that his work would be as accessible as possible to the wider public. It is therefore not surprising that his poems were generally well-known (sung at the folk meetings called sijelo)27 and that it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that “Razgovor” was identified as his work. Kačić’s writing had a significant influence on the compilation of narratives of the anti-Ottoman wars. It is therefore not surprising that in one of his songs Kačić mentioned the battle of Krbava Field. It is worth noting that Kačić has erroneously described the Krbava battle as a victory for the Croatian army.28

Several folk poems on the Krbava battle were recorded in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, when these songs were still sung. The first one, “Prevareni ban Derenčin” [Misguided Ban Derencsényi], was recorded in Novi Vinodolski in 1889 by Antun Mažuranić. With the exception of the main character, the poem has nothing to do with the battle.29 Nevertheless, it is interesting that one of the leading participants in the battle, Ban Emeric Derencsényi, remained a popular character in folk poetry, especially as a tragic figure.

In contrast to that poem, the poem “Smrt bana Derenčina” [The Death of Ban Derencsényi], recorded by Luka Bervaldi Lucić on the island of Vis in 1890, has the battle of Krbava as its essential theme.30 It underlines the disastrous outcome of the battle as the beginning of the fall of the Kingdom of Croatia. It is interesting how the anonymous folk poet presented the reason for Derencsényi’s death as a result of ill fortune: his beautiful blue hair had fallen on his eyes and blinded him, causing his death.31

The second version of the same poem was recorded by Ante Petravić, a priest in Komiža on the island of Vis, in 1909. With the exception of having a modified title – “Pisma o Derenčinu banu” [The Song of Ban Derencsényi] – and a slightly different introduction, the poem is the same as the poem recorded by Bervaldi Lucić in 1890.32 Perhaps more interesting is the fact that the poem survived there until the middle of the twentieth century, only to be recorded again by poet Olinko Delorko in 1962.33

As these examples make clear, the Krbava battle was a theme of Croatian folk poetry for many centuries after the event. The narratives were shaped in various manners according to the historical moments in which they were composed, but they always underlined the sufferings of the wars against the Ottomans and always presented the battle of Krbava as the first and the most disastrous defeat of the Croats, a defeat that shaped future events. Furthermore, the principal actors of the battle, in particular Ban Emeric Derencsényi, were very popular characters in many folk poems, even if some of the poems did not deal specifically with the battle. It should be emphasized that the narratives of the Krbava battle were part of the folk culture of the people of the hinterland, who passed them on to the wider area of the Adriatic coast and the islands. From there, the narratives “traveled” with the migration of people in the period between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries beyond the borders of the medieval Kingdom of Croatia to central Italy. It is therefore not surprising that the anti-Ottoman narratives were part of the culture of the Croats of Molise centuries after they had decided to flee the Ottoman threat and abandon their homeland.34

On the other hand, very soon after the disastrous defeat, the Krbava battle became a popular topic of high literature. Mavro Vetranović (1482/1483–1576), an early sixteenth-century Renaissance poet from Dubrovnik, first recorded a narrative of the Krbava battle in one of his poems. Vetranović, in his poem “Tužba grada Budima” [The Lament of the City of Buda], stressed the loss of Croatian glory at the battle of Krbava Field and compared the Krbava battle with the battle of Kosovo field in 1448.35 Although Vetranović’s poetry was extant only in a seventeenth-century manuscript and was published for the first time only in the late nineteenth century, the author was very popular in his lifetime and his poetry was disseminated within the elite circles of his city.36 His writing therefore contributed to the presence of the narrative of the Krbava battle there.

After Vetranović, Hanibal Lucić from Hvar popularized a narrative of the Krbava battle by making Ban Derencsényi the main male protagonist of his play “Robinja” [The Slave Girl]. Although Lucić did not mention the battle of Krbava Field itself, he glorified the role of the ban in facing the Ottoman threat.37 Moreover, his composition represented the first play that spread anti-Ottoman sentiment among wider audiences. The play was performed for the first time most probably before 1530, but was only published for the first time in Venice not much before 1638. Lučić’s “Robinja” was the most popular of his plays, and during his lifetime it was preformed not only in Hvar, but also in Split and Dubrovnik. It is also interesting to note that one version of Lučić’s “Robinja” continued to be performed in a folk version on the island of Pag in the northern part of the east Adriatic up to the beginning of the twentieth century.38

Thus narratives of the Krbava battle were familiar to the common people and were also part of high literature, even in the coastal area of present-day Croatia, which were rather distant from the Krbava region, as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century. Despite the distance between the site of the battle and the area where the narratives were recorded, one can argue that the accounts were very informative and preserved the general idea of the importance of the retellings of the battle as part of the Croatian national corpus, especially considering the fact that they were written in vernacular Croatian (Čakavian dialect) and thus were understandable to the widest possible audience.

The Development of the Narratives in Chronicles and Historical Works from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century

Over the course of the sixteenth century, narratives of the battle were incorporated in chronicles and historical works. Two sixteenth-century German chronicles dating from more or less the same period merit mention. Jacob Unrest, a priest in a parish near Wörtersee in the Duchy of Carinthia, wrote his work Die Österreichische Chronik in the period between 1500 and 1509. His account of the Krbava battle is very brief, and the names of the participants and toponyms are misspelled. He was interested in the events, because the raids of the Ottomans advanced all the way to Carniola and Carinthia.39 Another old-German chronicle played a more important role in the dissemination of an account of the battle of Krbava Field to the West. Knight Florian Waldauf von Waldenstein, a protonotary of Emperor Maximilian I Habsburg, was also one of the envoys to the court of King Wladislas II of Hungary in Buda, charged with the task of reaching a truce with the Ottomans.40 His chronicle remained in manuscript form, kept at the court in Innsbruck until the early twentieth century, and it does not explicitly mention the battle. However, it is important to stress that evidently a narrative of the battle of Krbava was known at the court because the struggle had been depicted on a relief on the cenotaph of Emperor Maximilian in the Hofkirche in Innsbruck (Tyrol).41 It is not surprising that accounts of the events of the battle were known because the aforementioned envoy Waldenstein was in the service of the emperor. In addition, since the battle was depicted in a relief in a church that was a center of a famous pilgrimage site, clearly accounts of the events spread in virtually innumerable directions from here.

Another major European force was also interested in the development of warfare against the Ottomans, namely the Republic of Venice. The Historia Turchesca, which was written between 1509 and 1514 by Donado da Lezze, represented one step in that direction.42 The author was a Venetian patrician and an amateur chronicler, whose main purpose was to write a chronology of the Ottoman Empire, since he was, while he was writing this work, the Venetian Count Provisor on the Greek island of Zante, and he had just spent some time in Cyprus. Donado da Lezze provided a very picturesque and detailed account of the battle, but he made many mistakes in the names, toponyms and chronology of the events. Historians have hypothesized that he may have been using an unknown (and no longer extant) report, or that he may have drawn on various different accounts. His retelling was widely received since it had been written in Italian. It was read not only in Italy, but also in other areas of Western Europe. Consequently even today two copies are extant (both of them kept in Paris). It should be noted that, in general, when dealing with other matters in the work, the author incorporated accounts of his contemporaries, so it is possible that he was doing the same thing when writing about the battle of Krbava. Historians have also conjectured that, when describing the events of the Krbava battle, da Lezze most probably used a report that was circulating in Croatia at the time, thus his work should be regarded as more indicative of the reception of this unknown (and thus hypothetical) record, yet one should also keep in mind that his work was used later by Italian and Croatian chroniclers. We do not know what sources he used, but one fact is significant: da Lezze was connected by marriage to the counts of Krbava. Katherine, sister of Ban John Karlović, was married to Bernardo da Lezze, so Donado might have heard the story from her, but this is merely a hypothesis for which the source materials offer no corroboration.43

Paolo Giovio, a member of the Roman Curia and a university professor in Rome, also used an unknown Croatian report that was circulating in the mid-sixteenth century. His account of the Krbava battle is short and many of the alleged facts he mentions are wrong. His work, entitled Commentario delle Cose di Turchi, certainly was widely read, as it was published in 1532 in Basel in Italian (and some sources indicate that one edition was published in Venice a year before) and a Latin translation was published in Strasbourg in 1537.44 Furthermore, it was published in different publishing centers of Christian Europe, and, finally, it was used later by many chroniclers.

Other versions of the events which are told from the perspective of the Ottomans began to emerge in the sixteenth century. The oldest work, known as “the Ottoman Anonym,” was written at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but the earliest surviving manuscript is the one kept in Sarajevo from the end of the sixteenth century or perhaps the beginning of the seventeenth century.45 The author is unknown, but it may have been written by one of the Ottoman courtiers. The main purpose of the text is to give a chronology of the history of the Ottoman Empire from 1295 to 1519, but the principal value is the fact that the author has put to paper what he had heard at the court. The reception of the text was relatively limited because it spread only in the inner circles of the Ottoman court. The work entitled the Crown chronicle by Sa’d-ud-din Mehmed ben Hasan hafiz Jemal ud-din, a high court official and teacher of Prince Murat, was more widely read. The author wrote a chronology of the Ottoman Empire using older Ottoman sources, which were available to him at the Sultan’s court.46 The account is written in a very typical Ottoman style for chronicles, with many references to the Qur’an and emphasis on the idea that the Christians suffered defeats because they were infidels, but it provides a good and accurate account of the battle and the events that preceded it. The main value of the work for Croatian scholarship was that many manuscripts were copied from the end of the sixteenth century onwards. Also, it was used by the court officials and members of the aristocracy, and a lithography was published in Istanbul in 1863. Both of these Ottoman sources are important because they depict Ottoman versions of the events, according to Ottoman traditions, thus they enable one to examine the development of the narrative from the other side. But they did not influence the construction of the narrative on the Croatian side until the late nineteenth century, when they were published by Šišić.

Ottoman sources were used by Rabbi Joseph ben Jehosea ben Meir ha Cohen ha Sefardi, a pharmacist who lived in Genoa and Voltaggio and who wrote a chronicle of the French kings and Ottoman emperors in Hebrew.47 His work, in contrast to the Ottoman accounts, was published in Venice as early as 1554. Almost two centuries later, a second edition was published in Amsterdam. Since he was using Ottoman sources with different orthography, he got the names of the Christian leaders wrong. His work was written in Hebrew and was part of Jewish historiography, which put emphasis on the conflicts between the Muslims (Arabs and Ottomans) and the Christian world from the time of the first Crusade up to the mid-sixteenth century. It was not widely read outside of the Jewish communities, even though it was published in Venice. Therefore, it became part of Croatian historiography only after it had been translated into Hungarian in the late nineteenth century. The Ottoman and Jewish accounts have entered into Croatian historiography due to the source collection of Ferdo Šišić, on which we touch in a moment.

Another source was written on the basis of the Ottoman sources, yet this time of German provenience. Johannes Löwenklau, a courtier in Savoy and teacher of Greek in Heidelberg, published a work entitled Historiae Musulmanae Turcorum de monumentis ipsorum in Frankfurt in 1591.48 The author traveled through the Kingdom of Hungary and the Ottoman Empire because of his personal interest in the history of Ottoman Empire. Löwenklau’s work is important because it describes the events before and after the battle. Also, his chronology is more precise, though it was written according to the Muslim calendar. The work was more widely read since it was published in German and the book circulated among members of the educated classes.

 

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Of the chronicles originating in the Croatian historical lands, three sixteenth-century ones merit mention. The first, entitled Commentarii de temporibus suis, was written in 1522 by Louis Crijević Tubero, a well-educated Benedictine monk from Dubrovnik.49 When Tubero has traveled to Hungary, he stayed in the bishop’s palace in Bács as a guest of Archbishop Gregory Frankapan of Kalocsa, brother of the late Count George Frankapan, one of the Croatian magnates who perished in the battle of Krbava Field.50 Although Tubero gave only a brief account with incorrectly spelled names, he was the first author to explain the failure of the Christian army as a result of the misguided tactics of Ban Emeric Derencsényi. His account was well received among the nobility of Dubrovnik, and it was later incorporated in other writings. Tubero had heard the story in the north and then transferred it to the south of Dalmatia. The work was published in Frankfurt in 1603, and it was read by members of the educated classes in Dubrovnik. It is presumed that another chronicler, Friar John Tomašić, was also well connected with the Frankapan family. His work, Chronicon breve regni Croatiae, was written around 1561.51 The book was written in Latin, but with inserted dialogues in Croatian. Tomašić continued the work of an anonymous predecessor, using the documents from the Frankapan archives and their oral family history. Historians have also hypothesized that Tomašić may have been using a Croatian source from the beginning of the sixteenth century that today is unknown, in addition to the aforementioned work of Paolo Giovio. Tomašić’s work was preserved in the archive of the Counts Auersperg in Logensteinleiten in Upper Austria. The story was known in Austria at that time in part because it was the period of the most aggressive Ottoman raids in the country, and so people took a greater interest in the events that had taken place in Croatia. However, in Croatia, Tomašić’s work was not widely known until it was published in 1868 by Ivan Kukuljević.52 In regard to its content, it is similar to Tubero’s account, since Tomašić also contended that the defeat was a consequence of the bad tactics of Ban Emeric Derencsényi.

At more or less the same time, the narrative of the battle of Krbava had only limited echoes in northern Croatia. Antun Vramec, a canon of the Chapter of Zagreb and a parish priest in Zagreb and later in Varaždin, wrote a short chronology in order to incorporate the history of the South Slavs into a general history entitled Kronika vezda znovich zpravliena Kratka Szlouenzkim iezikom [A Short Chronicle Newly Prepared in the Slavonic Language], which was published in 1578.53 In his work, Vramec completely omitted information regarding the battle of Krbava, though he mentioned the battle of the Vrpile pass of 1491, which, in contrast to the Krbava battle, was a huge victory for Christian forces led by Ban Ladislas Egervári. It was widely read in the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia at the time, in part because it was published in vernacular Croatian (the Kajkavian dialect) and, possibly, because it was distributed in many parishes of the region.54 Later, his work was used by Paul Ritter Vitezović, a point to which we shall return.

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One of the most influential seventeenth-century historical works, the influence of which was massive in the early-modern world, was the Regni Hungarici historia libris XXXIV exacte descripta by Nicholas Istvánffy, the royal chancellor and vice-palatine of the Kingdom of Hungary.55 Istvánffy’s primary intention was to write in chronological order the history of the kingdom from the death of King Matthias Corvinus in 1490 up to 1605, the year in which it was written. He wrote in the manner of the historians of the antiquity. His style is learned and picturesque and rather objective. His primary source is Bonfini’s work. In his writings, he gives many details concerning the events preceding the battle (i.e. a description of the conflict between the Frankapani and Ban Emeric Derencsényi). Thus, his writings, like Bonfini’s, were anti-Frankapan. The work was published in Cologne in 1622 by Peter Pázmány, the archbishop of Esztergom, and was widely circulated among members of the educated classes of the Kingdom. Later, Istvánffy had an influence on Rattkay, Vitezović, and Krčelić.

The first historian who was influenced by Istvánffy was Francis Rattkay, a canon of the Chapter of Zagreb, who wrote his work Memoria Regum et Banorum Regnorum Dalmatiae, Croatiae et Sclavoniae (published in 1652).56 Rattkay was writing the history of the Kingdom of Croatia, Dalmatia and Slavonia in order to present its political peculiarity to the Habsburg court with the purpose of propagating a war against the Ottomans and bringing about the liberation of the occupied parts of the kingdom. Hence, Rattkay provides a detailed description of the events (the siege of the Brinje castle, the course of the battle itself, and, finally, although he emphasized the role of Ban Emeric Derencsényi, he stated that only Count Bernardin Frankapan bore responsibility for the defeat). Because of some of his ideas Rattkay was accused of being anti-protestant, so his work was not welcomed in Germany (some exemplars of it were even burned). Nevertheless, in Croatia it was widely read by members of the educated classes.57

The last seventeenth-century work that is going to be discussed here is the chronicle of Paul Ritter Vitezović, published in 1696 in Zagreb. Vitezović wanted to compile a short history of the world in which he incorporated the history of the Croats.58 With regards to 1493, he simply noted that Ban Emeric Derencsényi, Charles of Corbavia and Bernardin Frankapan fought a battle against the Ottomans. He emphasized the enormity of the losses and the death of many noblemen in the battle. Written in Croatian, Vitezović’s work was intended to be read by a large audience. It was published in Zagreb (as were his other works) as a political project by decision of Croatian Diet, and accordingly it was distributed among the intelligentsia in Croatia.59 For these purposes he founded a printing office in Zagreb with the financial help of Bishop Alexander Ignatius Mikulić of Zagreb. However, an account of the battle of Krbava as short as his could hardly do much to spread knowledge of the narrative among the Croatian people (his work focused primarily on other topics).

 

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In the eighteenth century, the narrative of the battle of Krbava Field was limited to the work of Balthazar Adam Krčelić. In 1754, his work, entitled Povijest stolne zagrebačke crkve [The history of the Zagreb Cathedral], was published, but it was soon censored and only a few copies were distributed. Because of this, the reception of the work was relatively narrow, and it also contained many quotes and statements that do not correspond with the accounts found in other sources. It was republished only in 1770.60 Krčelić used the work of Bonfini to articulate his account of the Ottoman threat, but he made only passing mention of the calamities and pointed out that further information on the events could be found in Istvánffy’s work.

The Narratives in the Long Nineteenth Century

The mid-nineteenth century and the second half of the century were a period in which the processes of the national integration and unification of the historical Croatian lands came to its culmination. The same development was visible among other Central European nations as well, thus it is not surprising that their histories were also used for the purpose of forging national identity.

The first modern Croatian historical narrative with a synthetic nature was Hrvati na izmaku srednjega vijeka [Croats at the End of the Middle Ages] by Matija Mesić, who was, together with Franjo Rački, Šime Ljubić and Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski, one of the leading figures in the formation of modern historical scholarship.61 His work was published in the mid-nineteenth century in Croatian in the journal Književnik [The Man of Letters], one of the two major journals that were publishing historical articles. His view on the events before and after the battle is based on the sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century historical works, such as those of Bonfini, Tubero, Istvánffy, Krčelić, and so on. His main goal was to provide an overview of the Croatian-Ottoman wars, focusing on the reaction of the royal court of king Wladislas II after the battle. Matija Mesić was a professional historian and the first rector of the newly founded university of Zagreb. He wanted to present the history of the Croats at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century. Possible reception of his work was limited, of course, to the circle of the nineteenth-century intellectuals and the educated public, at a time when history was used for the purpose of strengthening national identity and politics. The work of Tadija Smičiklas, also one of the central figures of late nineteenth-century scholarship, should also be interpreted from the perspective of the formation of national identity, especially his narrative entitled Poviest hrvatska [Croatian History].62 It should be noted that his work was published by the Matica hrvatska in a large number of copies, as it was the first modern comprehensive survey of Croatian history. Smičiklas’ work underlined the role of Bishop Divnić and his mission at the Roman curia, thus exploiting his account of the massive defeat of the Christian army and the annihilation of the population in the area around the site of the battle.

The opus of Vjekoslav Klaić had an even greater impact on the diffusion of the narrative of the battle of Krbava.63 The general idea of his work was to produce an expansive history of the Croats from the Middle Ages up to his time, the end of the nineteenth century. As a professor of general history at the University of Zagreb, he was one of the leading figures of positivist historiography, and his account of the Krbava battle was intended to explain the role the battle had in the history of the fifteenth-century Kingdom. Klaić gave his opinion about the accuracy and reliability of his sources. Thus, he classified Bonfini’s and Tubero’s work as not reliable, yet in his assessment a letter of bishop Divnić was reliable. It is important to stress that Klaić emphasized that the battle was the beginning of the disintegration of the Kingdom of Croatia by using the words of Divnić: “this is the first destruction of Croatia, where all the Croatian nobility has perished (Hec est prima destructio regni Corvatie ibique tota nobilitas corruit Corvatie).” One of the distinctive features of this publication was that it contained a large number of visual sources, such as a woodcut by Hans Burgkmair, which was originally done for the “Weisskunig,” a poetical allegory for Emperor Maximillian I of Habsburg.64 The strong impact of the woodcut is noticeable in the fact that it depicts the Ottomans in the classical topoi of the barbarians who have been so violent to the enemy that they have cut off the noses of the Christian knights at Krbava Field. The work of Klaić almost immediately sold out, and it acquired a cult status among both scholars and the wider population. It is therefore not surprising that a new edition was issued in the 1980s, although the first edition had been published more than eighty years earlier.

A special place within the historiography of the battle of Krbava goes to Ferdo Šišić, a historian who was active at the turn of the century. Šišić’s first work on the battle of Krbava was written with the purpose of commemorating the four-hundredth anniversary of the battle. It was published by the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts.65 Šišić wrote a historical discussion in which for the first time he compared the battle of Krbava with the battle of Kosovo of 1389.66 In the appendix, he included the first translation of the account of the aforementioned Ottoman historian Sa’d-ud-din, in all likelihood based on the Hungarian translation, since it was published by the Hungarian Academy under the title Turkish History some time earlier. In doing so, he began to publish source material connected with the battle of Krbava. The final result was that he published a critical edition of all available sources on the battle in 1937.67 Šišić’s work and source publication has served as the basis for all subsequent scholarship.

Twentieth-Century Narratives

In the period of the First Yugoslavia (1918–41), especially after the establishment of the dictatorship of King Alexander I Karađorđević on January 6, 1929, the political climate encouraged the unity of the artificially created Yugoslav nation, that is, the particularities of the South Slavic nations of Croats, Slovenians, Serbs and others were downplayed or denied. The narrative of the Krbava battle once again became rather important in maintaining the national identity of the Croats. Hence, in the first year of the daily newspaper Hrvatska straža [Croatian Guard], Petar Grgec, one of the key figures and ideologists of the Croatian Catholic movement, published a work entitled Žrtve Krbavskog polja. Što o tome kaže povijest [The Casualties of Krbava Field. What History Tells Us About Them].68 Several years later, the same author wrote a popular account of the history of Ban John Karlović of Krbava entitled Hrvatski Job šesnaestoga vijeka [Croatian Job of the Sixteenth Century] as a special edition of the series established by the Literary Society of St. Jerome, the main purpose of which was to publish in a popular manner booklets of romanticized histories from the “old Croatian history” for the wider public (at first, for the peasantry). Although the account is based on the life of John Karlović, who was later ban of Croatia, Grgec interprets the legacy of his family as a symbol of the Croatian struggle in the defense of Christianity against the Ottomans. In the booklet, Ban Karlović is compared with the biblical character of Job, because he was referred to by this name on his grave inscription in Remete near Zagreb. Grgec also uses fictional characters to present the story and as a personification of the Croatian people in the form of the young noblewoman Dorothy, the fiancé of a certain Count Perazović (also fictional). The bride-to-be falls down dead when she hears of the defeat at Krbava Field: “Then, when this had heard young Dorothy, her heart was rent with sadness, she fell on the dirty soil of sorrow.”69 The price of the book was very low and very acceptable and accessible for a general reader. It should also be stressed that publishing during the period of the dictatorship of King Alexander was very unfriendly to publications of the Croatian opposition, thus giving Grgec greater importance.

Accounts of the battle have also figured in encyclopedias since the period of the First Yugoslavia, with differences in interpretation according to the prevailing state formation, though essentially consistent from the perspective of their content. Hence, in the Narodna enciklopedija srpsko-hrvatsko-slovenačka [National Encyclopadia of Serbians, Croatians and Slovenians] the battle of Krbava is presented in connection with the official political view, which proclaimed the unity of South Slavic peoples against “others.”70 A parallel is drawn between the battle of Krbava Field (1493) and the battle that took place in Kosovo (1389), which were both great defeats of Christian armies against the Ottomans. The author, Josip Modestin, makes the inaccurate contention that in the early sixteenth century the aforementioned Renaissance poet Mavro Vetranović had connected both battles, as this contention harmonized with and buttressed the political idea of Yugoslav unity.

In the period of World War II, another political system existed in the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state of the Third Reich, and in this period another encyclopedia was published, or to be precise, a couple of volumes of another encyclopedia were published.71 Although the volumes were mostly published in that period, the project itself had started earlier and the articles were not directly influenced by fascist ideology. However, the war slowed down the enterprise, and the edition did not reach the letter K (in fact, only five volumes were published, up to the letter E). Yet, there is mention of the battle of Krbava under the entry on Ban Emeric Derencsényi, which gives an account of the contemporary or semi-contemporary sources. In the end, it was not widely read, because after the war the project came to an abrupt halt, as it was designated as a pro-Nazi enterprise by the new communist regime.

In the period of the second, socialist Yugoslavia, Enciklopedija Jugoslavije [Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia], which was published in 1963, brought a new element into the narrative of the battle of Krbava, since it began from the reference point of the classical Marxist concept of clashes of social classes and struggles of the lower layers of society.72 Thus, the author, Lieutenant Colonel Dragoljub Joksimović, interprets the battle of Krbava as an event in which the “peasants fought with axes and hayforks,” and makes only short mention of the detail that numerous prominent members of the Croatian nobility perished as well. In the present-day encyclopedia, Hrvatska enciklopedija [Croatian Encyclopedia],73 which was published after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the entry on the Krbava battle is short and offers only a hasty summary of the course of the events and their aftermath, without any political pretensions.74

Historiography in the twentieth century has dealt with the battle of Krbava in comprehensive surveys of the history of the historical Croatian lands, usually with interpretations that are adapted to the prevailing political system, whatever it happened to be. In 1916, shortly before the disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy, the aforementioned Croatian historian Ferdo Šišić, in addition to his book and source collection on the battle, noted that a survey of Croatian history “is demanded not only by Croatian intelligentsia, but also by Croatian youth, in order to use it as a handbook for studying Croatian history in higher grades of mid-education.” He himself responded to this demand.75 The edition was so widely read that it went through two subsequent editions, one in 1920 and one in 1962. Although Šišić gives only a brief account of the battle, it is interesting that he notes that, because of the events that took place during the battle, people in Krbava Field refer to it as “Krvavo polje” [Bloody field]. Meanwhile, in 1953 the first official history of the constitutive countries of the Second Yugoslavia was published as a two-volume edition entitled Historija naroda Jugoslavije [The History of the Peoples of Yugoslavia]. It contains a narrative of the battle of Krbava that adhered to contemporaneous movements within both the historiography and the prevailing political situation.76 It is also worth noting that it conveys the principles of class struggle and stresses the unity of South Slavic “brotherly nations.”

During the war of Croatian independence (1991–95) following the disintegration of Yugoslavia, there again emerged the need for a revived national narrative and thus the battle of Krbava was employed to strengthen the sense of the collective identity of the Croats.77 Once again, the anniversary of the battle of Krbava in 1993, this time the five-hundredth, was used to push to the foreground of people’s sense of communal identity the events that took place at Krbava Field. A conference was held in Novi Vinodolski, because Udbina, at Krbava Field, was under Serbian occupation at the time. In 1997, the conference proceedings were published in a collective volume, which contains 15 articles on the battle of Krbava from various perspectives, including history, archaeology, the social sciences and, finally, collective memory.78

Narratives of the battle of Krbava are also found in surveys of Croatian history by two regular members of the Croatian Academy, both educated in the manner of the school of French Annales, Tomislav Raukar79 and Franjo Šanjek.80 In both of these monographs, since the emphasis is put more on the social aspects of Croatian history, the authors refer only briefly to the battle of Krbava, depicting it without any political connotations.81

In 2002, when a new bishopric was established in the area of Lika and Krbava (under the joint title of Gospić and Senj), an idea was inspired by a speech and the endeavors of the bishop, Monsignor Mile Bogović, by profession also a historian. The idea was to build a new church in Udbina at Krbava Field consecrated to the “Croatian martyrs.”82 Udbina was chosen as a lieu de mémoire of the defeat and massacre of the Croatian nobility and the destruction of the medieval Kingdom of Croatia. The initiative was elevated to the national level, since in 2003 the Croatian parliament gave its support to the project. In the end, the church was consecrated in 2011, exactly on the 518th anniversary of the battle of Krbava. Following the parliamentary decision of 2003, a survey of the history of the battle of Krbava by Anđelko Mijatović was published in 2005.83 The book was written in both a scholarly and a more widely accessible manner. It was well-illustrated with depictions of the events and was widely distributed, thus making the narrative of the battle of Krbava Field once again very much present in the public mind.

Conclusions

The battle of the Krbava had a devastating effect on the ability of the Christian army to resist Ottoman incursions and expansion. Numerous Croatian noblemen lost their lives, and the calamity sparked the flight of the population from the surrounding area. Narratives of the battle of Krbava spread immediately after the event. One can trace two versions, an “official” royal version and an “anti-royal” version, which most probably was promoted by the noble family of the Frankapani. The first emphasized the role of the Frankapani and their alleged betrayal, while the second put the blame for the defeat on the military strategy of a royal officer, Ban Emeric Derencsényi of Croatia. The second version was spread by papal envoys, who took the story to the area of the Holy Roman Empire, which is not surprising since the area of the Frankapani was directly threatened and thus required the assistance of the Pope. For this reason, in the period beginning in the sixteenth century and ending in the eighteenth one finds sporadic and not very detailed reports conveyed by foreign and Croatian chronicles, except those connected predominately with the cultural circle of the noble Frankapani family. It is important to emphasize that while the loss of life was great and certainly made a deep impression on people at the time, the battle was hardly regarded as a total catastrophe. Thus, writings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries do not mention the battle at all, and when they do, they offer only a vague account or short mention of the fact that it happened.

The spread of the narrative among the people can be traced directly from the writings of pilgrims and travelers after the battle, who emphasized that they had heard accounts of the battle from people who had witnessed it personally. Folktales in which the battle is the main focus were recorded primarily in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, but since their language has not been sufficiently analyzed by the linguists, it is not possible to claim that they were spread much before they were recorded, though this cannot be disregarded as a possibility either. However, they were recorded and popularized at a moment when the topos of the battle of Krbava became one of the important elements in the formation of the Croatian national identity. At the turn of the century, professional historians, in connection with placing the focus of their research on the battle of Krbava, started to publish all the source material for further research. Within the framework of various Croatian state formations of the twentieth century, narratives of the battle of the Krbava conveyed the prevailing political climate, and scholarship emphasized various factors that were regarded as important at the given moment. The second revival of the narrative appeared during the war of Croatian independence in the 1990s, when once again historical events were used to strengthen national identity of the Croats. Scholarship and conferences were influenced by this, with the climax in the construction of a Church in Udbina at Krbava Field consecrated to the “Croatian martyrs.”

 

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Vramec, Antun. Kronika vezda znovich zpravliena Kratka Szlouenzkim iezikom [A Short Chronicle New and Again Prepared in the Slavic Language]. Edited by Alojz Jembrih. Varaždin–Zagreb: Hrvatska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti–Kršćanska sadašnjost, 1992.

Appendix 1. The Fight Against the Turks in Croatia – cenotaph of Maximilian I in Hofkirche in Innsbruck (Tyrol), by Alexander Colyn, tabl. 9 (detail)*

 

* Accessed March 23, 2015, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Reliefs_on_the_Sarcophagus_of_Maximilian#/media/File: Innsbruck_1_339.jpg.

Gabriella Erdélyi

Turning Turk as Rational Decision in the Hungarian–Ottoman Frontier Zone 

 

This essay will attempt to offer a glimpse into the situations and considerations that played a role in the decisions of Christians, primarily women, who voluntarily stood among the Turks in the Hungarian–Ottoman contact zone. This insight will highlight marriages that spanned the Christian–Muslim borders. On the one hand because the letters of papal pardon which abandoned Christian spouses submitted to the Apostolic Penitentiary in order to gain permission to remarry serve as the basis for analysis; and on the other hand because marriage typically served as the gateway through which people entered the opposite culture. This essay places emphasis on those individual and group experiences that made voluntary movement between cultures possible and the situative character of individual and religious identity at the time.

Keywords: voluntary conversions to Islam, conversion for marriage, female agency, Christian–Muslim frontier regions. 

 

Introduction

In this essay I deal with the consequences of war on the agency of ordinary women and men.1 The stress is on female social practices, which are more illuminating in comparison to the male experience. The war in question is not a single battle, but the long struggle between the medieval Kingdom of Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The political-military consequences of the conflict are common knowledge: the middle regions of the Hungary came under Ottoman rule until the end of the seventeenth century. 

Hungarian Ottomanists reconstructed the military and economic administration of Ottoman Turks in subjected Hungary as well as on its border zone. As a byproduct of this immense work with serial sources produced by Ottoman and Hungarian authorities in their effort to more profitably exert their power over their subjects, we also have occasional glimpses into the experiences of the population at large: danger and fear, mass killings, deserted and depopulated areas, refugees, captivity and enslavement of huge masses or, at best, paying taxes to both Ottoman and Hungarian authorities.2 

Here I direct the reader’s attention to another face of “contact zones,” the spaces of cross-cultural encounters in which historically separated peoples come into contact and establish ongoing relations, involving coercion, unequal power relations and conflict.3 The protagonists of this essay are the less familiar figures of Ottoman Hungary who voluntarily crossed the Christian–Muslim border. Standing at the center are stories of a woman and of a man, both of whom opted to go from Christian regions to lands occupied by the Turks, leaving a Christian spouse for the sake of an Islamic one. The liberty of their decision thus cannot be compared to those renegades who subjected themselves to the Ottomans, either voluntarily or by force, while living under their authority. The present study aims to better understand the rationality underlying their exceptional choices.

The stories told about them must be read with circumspection, since they were constructed by their abandoned spouses to serve their prevailing objectives. Sin is a central concept of these stories, their genre being the supplication to the pope asking for his pardon.4 Although their narratives were clearly influenced both by the procedure of issuing a pardon, which involved the transcription of a petition by a professional proctor who followed a prescribed protocol, and also by the legal demands to which they had to conform, petitioners were the unquestionable authors of their own narratives.5 The way they presented the story of their first marriages was a tactic in the process of negotiating the validity of their second marriages with local and central authorities. A prerequisite of this was to have their first marriage declared void. Petitioners used the “apostasy” of their spouses—with a broad interpretation of canonical regulations—as an argument to this end.6 Yet, we need not suspect gross lies. To have the marriage annulled, it usually sufficed to present a plausible story of being abandoned, waiting in vain for the return or failed recalls of the stubborn spouse. Petitions had to be both efficacious and credible so as not to lose their convincing potency. In other words, women and men turning Turk in the Christian–Muslim contact zone of Hungary were authentic figures for both the authors and the readers of these stories. Moreover, their content was checked during the official procedure of papal pardoning and had to be ratified by witnesses. Unsurprisingly enough, domination and agency were both inherent in the complex scenario of pardoning, just as the dialectic of the same two processes shaped the intercultural social practices—most importantly Christian women freely marrying Turks—discussed here. This documentation of the late medieval papal regulation of Christian–Muslim relations is exceptionally illuminating, since it opens a window unto an early phase (otherwise underrepresented in the local source material) of Christian–Muslim interactions in Hungary. 

Historians have recently found interest in women leaving a Christian marriage for the world of Islam, since in these stories women exceptionally appear as active agents capable of shaping their own lives. Additionally, their voluntary marriages with Muslim men seem to question the subordination of women to men in the Islamic world. It is crucially the figure of litigating women appearing in court documents that dominate the corpulent scholarly literature, which portrays women as having spheres of autonomous action (economic transactions, pious endowments, divorce suits) in contrast to the traditional image of their subordination and passivity.7 Women negotiating their familial and social relations before the kadis provided the historical lesson that it was possible for capable women to subvert patriarchal relations. Christian women converting to Islam at court also questioned traditionally imagined husband–wife relations.8 The vivid historical narratives of distinguished Venetian women remarrying in Istanbul highlighted the strategic use of converting to Islam: a way for young people to escape from arranged marriages or get rid of unpleasant spouses.9  

In the present study I attempt to portray from their own perspective the situation of women who chose to marry Ottoman men in the Hungarian–Ottoman frontier zone and in Ottoman Hungary (the middle parts of the medieval kingdom), which will make it possible to contribute to the scholarly discourse on the independence of early modern women. Writing recently about litigant female serfs who possessed their own property and played the role of head of family, Katalin Péter stated that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented a particularly advantageous period in terms of the exercise of independence for such women in Hungary.10 However, the Christian woman choosing a Muslim husband is, to the contrary, an unknown or obscure figure that occasionally emerges only incidentally as a minor character in both contemporary and modern historical narratives. Symbolic of such figures is the person of Zsuzsanna Goda from the market town of Gyöngyös in Ottoman Hungary: Goda married a Turk from Vác named Fáti in the 1660s, thus rendering her a Turk, which entailed impalement, the punishment due to criminals, argues Ferenc Szakály, one of the leading experts on Ottoman Hungary.11 We hear, exceptionally, of Zsuzsanna because the chief magistrate purchased from her a vineyard, which the kadi had awarded to her in a lawsuit against a Christian, and—in the eyes of the noble comitatus, the refugee Hungarian authority that laid the exclusive claim to the administration of property affairs in Ottoman Hungary—he had thus committed the offense of “Turkism” (turcismus) as a result of doing business with “the Turk [in other words Zsuzsanna]” for which he was condemned to execution by impalement.12 Hungarian authorities did not harass Zsuzsanna Goda and the motives for her choice have not yet raised the interest of researchers of Ottoman Hungary. According to Klára Hegyi, who may know the most about the society of Ottoman Hungary,13 women who chose Turkish husbands, alongside the socially diverse cross section of men who entered Turkish military service, represented one of the territory’s small groups of voluntary renegades perceptible in Ottoman sources.14 Marriage contracts concluded before kadis, for example, in some instances suggest that the wife had previously been a Christian (that is, a Hungarian or an Orthodox Christian South Slav).15 This observation is compatible with the 1550s description of the school rector from Tolna, a wealthy market town in Ottoman Hungary. For Pál Thuri Farkas, Christian women who married Muslims represented the sole group of voluntary renegades: unmarried women who had given birth to the children of Turkish men, ladies who had fled from their well-to-do husbands on the council to Turks and, typically, widows. The moralizing justification for their act is not surprising when considering the constraints of the genre of the humanist letter. The degree to which general stereotypes affected stories regarding women who left violent Christian husbands for Turks and the silence of their humiliated spouses and the extent to which these stories were based on the personal observation and experiences of the author is open to question.16 

The woman and the man in our story became renegades in the first years of Ottoman rule in central Hungary and some decades before the first law against renegades was encoded. In other words, at the very beginning of the legal process of constructing criminals of renegades, in contemporary words people who were de societate Turcica suspectus, as the first such law sanctioning the selling of Christian children to the Turks and the spying for the Turks in 1567 put it.17 The estates gathered at the national assembly held in Pozsony (Bratislava, Slovakia) in 1574 attempted, in cooperation with county officers, to inhibit the custom, spreading among both serfs and nobles living in border zones, of voluntarily (sponte) subjugating themselves to the Turks—that is, voluntarily paying taxes to them.18

In addition to the inhabitants of border zones who ensured their survival through the payment of taxes to Ottoman authorities, but did not change their religious identity, the fate in Ottoman Hungary which has long engaged historians is that of captives and slaves.19 In the writings of Sándor Takáts, who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the sole historian to deal with the lives of everyday people in Ottoman Hungary, voluntary renegades—spies, guides, henchmen, scribes performing in the service of the Turks—appear as characteristic, unexceptional figures.20 Takáts’s prism originated partially from his research of Viennese Hofkammer documents in which reports of submissive renegade “malefactors” and attendance to matters related to them were commonplace. Hofkammer officials regarded the “malefactors” of Ottoman Hungary who “hobnob with the Turks” with antipathy similar to that of the Pozsony estates. The antipathy of Takáts toward imperial policy and the Viennese lords turned the prism: the historian formed a romantic image of the chivalrous Turks and those women and men who in the hope of attaining material benefit and career and social advancement became Muslims, either in order to avoid conflict with authorities or out of true love. Only in the writings of Takáts do we discover that several pashas and beys had taken Hungarian women as wives or that the Hungarian spouse of the Turkish commander of the castle in Veszprém also spied for the Hungarians.21 

The voluntary renegades, among them women who left their Christian husbands for Muslim men and chose to live under Ottoman rule—be they exceptional or characteristic figures of the age—do not conform to the notion that religious identity formed the foundation of personal identity in the age of Ottoman Hungary and was one that could be changed only under compulsion.22 The question thus emerges: do texts from this period suggest that religion can be interpreted as a situative identity?23 The recent analyses of religious conversions, setting a broader social and cultural context in place of the traditional Christian narrative of conversion entailing the total transformation of the self,24 interpret it as a social practice and a tactic used by people in the context of their everyday encounters with a dominant system.25

Therefore if we want to better understand the actions of the Christian inhabitants of Ottoman Hungary, it would be worthwhile for us to examine the situations that prompted them to convert to the religion of the “mortal foe of Christianity.” In other words, when the religious difference was neutral for them and they followed a different rationale?26 Did they, for example, consider the world in which they found security or social advancement to be stronger? And what kinds of previous experiences and capabilities helped them to adapt to another culture? Who was able to turn the constraints and opportunities lying within the new system at the intersection of Christianity and Islam to their own advantage, how were they able to do so and under what circumstances? If we approach the issue of voluntary conversion from below and regard it as a rational act aimed at taking control of one’s own destiny amid external constraints, then Christian–Muslim conversion does not appear to be abnormal and deviant, but a mode of operating in everyday life, thus making the issue of representativity irrelevant. At this juncture we can refer to Peter Burke, who argues that exceptional cases are suggestive since they show moments when social mechanisms fail to work.27 Is it possible that the social integration of those who went over to the Turks ended up in failure? 

A Runaway Christian Wife Marries a Turk in Buda

Ferenc Csiszár, who lived in the diocesan town of Várad (Oradea, Romania), was abandoned by his wife for the sake of a Turkish man living in Buda. The events were subsequently narrated by the abandoned husband in his supplication addressed to the pope: his wife, who was the mother of his child, “instigated by diabolic inspiration, during the time he stayed away from his homeland, sold all their goods and ran away. She went to the city of Buda, in the regions of infidels, where she married a Turk.” He was unable to divert her from this intention, although “he sent many of his men after her, calling her back, some of whom were killed by the Turk, which put him to huge expenses.”28 We have no reason to doubt his words. It is uncharacteristic of men to take pride in being cuckolded (which was rather an issue raised by slanderers). Moreover, Ferenc appears as a man of strict morals. Contrary to others, in 1548 he turned to the pope not in order to obtain permission to remarry, but for permission to take the sacraments despite his disordered marital affairs. Obviously there must have been many people who got into similar situations, but never wanted or needed to restore their legal and spiritual status. 

These briefly described events suggest that a dramatic conflict of interest and emotion lay in the background. Csiszár seems to have been not only a stern and disappointed man, but a stingy one as well, as if he valued the goods his wife was taking more than his wife herself. Material losses could play an important role in the conflict between husband and wife, as it did in similar cases for example in early modern England.29 It seems likely that the hapless messengers that Csiszár sent to Buda also demanded a return of the “stolen property,” which his wife obviously believed was rightfully hers. The emotional and material aspects of this episode are palpable in the story presented to the pope. Unfortunately we do not find out from the account if their child remained with the husband in Várad or moved with the wife to Buda. 

What might have prompted Mrs. Csiszár to abandon her husband? She appears to have planned and prepared her daring move in advance, utilizing the temporary absence of her husband to make her escape. Mrs. Csiszár does not appear to have been a woman who ignorantly set out into the bigger world. What enticed her to leave Várad for Buda, the foreign-occupied former capital of the Kingdom of Hungary where the muezzin’s call to prayer could be heard in place of the ring of church bells? At the same time, Várad, due to its sacral character deriving from the cult of Saint Ladislaus, King of Hungary as well as its important role in long-distance trade and military government, continued to flourish and was considered at the time the potential capital of the divided kingdom.30 Was she seduced by the higher social standing, power and prestige of her new husband, whose resolute, aggressive conduct suggests that he was more likely a member of the Buda garrison or a member of the new civil service rather than a trader? Based on his name, her first husband may have been a gunsmith, likely a respected member of the local blacksmith or spurrier and bladesmith guild.31 How might she have met her new husband? Had she already been to Buda or the “Turk” in Várad? Or had she heard from elderly residents of Várad that the Turks had already devastated the city (in 1474) and decided that she would not risk their return to burn her home and carry away her family? She may have obtained first-hand information about the horrors of slavery from people like Bertalan Georgievics, who precisely in 1547 travelled to Várad, where he engaged in a public religious debate at a Franciscan cloister with a dervish who was in the city to hold talks with the bishop.32 That is, Magdolna was searching primarily for security, fleeing from the hostile sword as a survival strategy into the bed of the enemy?

One cannot exclude the possibility that love inspired the woman from Várad to leave her Christian husband, thus placing her in the company of renowned female figures, notably Othello’s Desdemona, who enthralled the readers of Renaissance literature of both high and low quality. We do not therefore know if she made a planned escape from a failed marriage in search for a new husband or if she was captivated by unexpected love. However, regardless of whether emotion, necessity or cold calculation served as the primary motive for her flight, the question emerges: what made it possible for the woman of Várad to adapt to another culture with such apparent ease? 

The Practice of Local Re-Marriages and The Making of Christian Bigamy

According to Jesuits who engaged in missionary activity in Ottoman Hungary, the flight of both women and men from ruined marriages frequently led them across the Christian–Muslim frontier.33 King Matthias Hunyadi (1458–90) drew the attention of the Roman Curia to the impact of the Ottoman–Hungarian wars on marriages in the Kingdom of Hungary: 

 

There are several inhabitants of the various parts of our country, whose spouse had been dragged away by the Turks. Husbands mourn their wives and wives lament over the unhappy fate of their husbands; they do not live in a marriage any more, but they are left in uncertainty concerning the life or death of their spouse, which makes them unwilling to remarry. […] Many, losing hope of ever being able to give birth to children, leave or ruin their inheritance and go to other regions, often to those held by the enemy, while others give rise to scandals.34 

 

In the opinion of the authorities, those who did not move elsewhere to remarry because they were attached to their old homes, villages and relatives caused the scandals.35 Thus the king requested that the pope should give license to remarry for those who lost their spouse and looked for him/her in vain among the infidels. According to the king’s diagnosis, some of those who lost spouses took the difficult step of leaving their homes for foreign lands, often those under Ottoman–Turkish dominion, in order to start new families. The wife of Illés Klokocsi apparently did this. Upon returning to his home in Zagreb following seven years of captivity in Turkey, Klokocsi did not find his wife, who must have had enough of waiting for him and decided to move away to find another spouse.36 In 1500 Klokocsi thus wrote a petition to the pope to legalize his second marriage.  

Seen within the context of everyday life in the Ottoman–Hungarian border zone, the actions of the woman from Várad were therefore not at all exceptional. It is conceivable that she went so far in order to escape an undesirable husband; though it is also possible that she believed that her “husband absent from the homeland” had been forever lost and she was aware that local Catholic authorities would not officially recognize her remarriage and could charge her with bigamy if her husband’s death could not be proven.37

Várad was the most important town in eastern Hungary at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Many women living in Várad under the lordship of either the bishop or the chapter, nevertheless decided to take the risk of remaining in the city to remarry, thus placing themselves in a very difficult position. The commissioned lawyer took care of another matter at the Roman Curia at the same time as that of Ferenc Csiszár: Anna Vadasi and Máté Agasi were reported at the court of the diocesan vicar because Anna had been betrothed to Máté when she was still married to her previous spouse.38 Her first husband may well have been the person who reported her to the vicar’s court. The decision of Anna and Máté to marry was rather heedless, entailing the foreseeable consequence of their forced separation and legal prohibition on living together again. However, their petition reveals that they nevertheless continued to reside under the same roof and even produced children. They were thus excommunicated from the Church on the grounds of bigamy and could not therefore attend mass or take sacraments. However, this did not bother the couple as much as the fact that their children were considered to be illegitimate. Thus when Anna’s first husband died, they requested papal absolution, the legitimation of their children and permission for their legal remarriage. The vicar of Várad, István Ilosvai,39 may have prompted Anna and Máté to address their petition to the pope, though it is also possible that they simply decided to bypass the local court that had already passed judgement against them and turned directly toward Rome. However, in the end they were not able to avoid the Várad court, since prior to their absolution the vicar had to conduct an examination to verify their allegations. That is, the court questioned local residents about the death of Anna’s first husband and the related circumstances. 

György Korláth’s daughter, Anna, belonged to an entirely different social group—the distinguished urban nobility. Anna thus found herself in a more difficult position when as an adult she balked at living in marriage with the man to whom she had been betrothed as a child—as she claimed at least.40 Several factors provide an indication of the family’s social standing. The guardian of the girl, who became an orphan at an early age, was the canon of the cathedral chapter and archdeacon of the diocese.41 He engaged the five-year-old Anna in marriage to Pál Szabó, whose name suggests that he was a master artisan, a member of the tailor’s guild. Following her engagement, Anna was placed under the tutelage of Poor Clare nuns at the Saint Anne monastery in the Venice district of Várad. According to Anna, the nuns persuaded her to formally confirm her engagement to Pál Szabó at the age of ten (which is more likely to have happened when she reached canonical adulthood at the age of twelve): which probably means that the betrothal and the marital vow took place.42 However, the betrothed couple was never united in matrimony, because either Anna or her canon guardian presumably reconsidered the betrothal a few years later, in view of a more favorable match.43 Likely at the instigation of the forsaken fiancé, this case was subsequently heard at the court of the vicar of Várad and, in the second instance, at that of the Archbishop of Esztergom and both Anna and her guardian were excommunicated. The noble origin of Anna Korláth is proven by the fact that this matter was also brought to the royal court of appeal (that is, to the Szapolyai court that spent much time in Várad), which decided that she must marry Pál Szabó. According to the customary law of the nobility, breaching the vow of marriage constituted infidelity and entailed the forfeiture of property.44 In a state of both Church and secular illegitimacy, Anna and her guardian looked to the Papal Court for support against local authorities in their effort to gain permission for her to marry a man other than Pál Szabó. 

Regardless of the outcome of the above cases, they clearly demonstrate that both Church and secular supervision over the local residents of Várad operated efficiently even during the civil war in the country. Those who maintained a significant degree of mobility caused the greatest amount of trouble for local authorities.45 The previously mentioned Mrs. Csiszár was quite aware of this situation and acted smartly: in order to live legitimately and free of official harassment with her chosen husband, she moved from Várad to the Islamic world in the neighboring state of Ottoman Hungary. It thus appears that under these circumstances, the difference in religion was of relatively little importance to Mrs. Csiszár, who would have qualified as a bigamist had she remained at home and therefore been subjected to excommunication from the Church for decades on end. 

What might have those Christians who voluntarily moved to Ottoman Hungary known about this world? Did Mrs. Csiszár fear the well-known subjugation of women in the Islamic world? Did she know anything about how Islamic law (sharia’h) regulated the conditions of women before running into the arms of a Turkish man, one might suppose, out of true love? To what degree did she perceive the religion and culture of Ottoman Hungary to be contrasting and foreign? 

 

The Experience of Religious and Ethnic Coexistence

The woman who placed herself under Ottoman authority in order to switch her Christian husband for a “Turk” was likely neither audacious nor enamored, but had simply made a rational appraisal of the benefits and drawbacks of doing so.46 As a resident of the Ottoman–Hungarian border zone, she may have possessed concrete knowledge and experience regarding the status of women in Islamic religion and law. She could have seen that the Turkish polygamy about which Christians who had returned from the interior of the Ottoman Empire had written so much, did not exercise an influence on everyday life on the periphery of the empire. Ottoman ordinary men and soldiers were happy if they could support even a single wife.47 Maybe she had heard that Ottoman men had the right to discard their wives at any time—a prerogative that a Dominican monk who had spent 20 years as a slave in the inner Ottoman Empire had not neglected to describe in detail.48 But even this prospect could not have been that daunting, since she may well have known Christian women whose husbands had simply sold them to others in order to settle a debt or simply get rid of them.49 And the possibility cannot be excluded that she met with Muslim women who had successfully petitioned the kadis for divorce on the grounds that their husbands were violent or had not provided for their subsistence.50 And she may have also been aware that Islamic law permitted women to remain Christians even after marrying Ottoman Turkish husbands.51 The latter right proceeded in paradoxical fashion precisely from the social differentiation between men and women in terms of religion and marriage: the Islamic state was not interested in the religion of wives, because the religion of children depended exclusively on that of their father.52 Moreover, a Christian woman living with a Muslim man theoretically maintained the same rights as a Muslim wife and could exercise her religion as well.53 Perhaps she had even seen women who due to the expectations of the community or her husband had converted to Islam, though had nevertheless baptized their children and travelled to Marian shrines at the time of the parish feast.54 The husband of the runaway woman was not unlikely a converted new Muslim, himself the offspring of Balkan peoples who continued to observe Christian customs and rites.55 New Muslims were not, however, more tolerant in terms of religion: in fact, as a result of the increasing interconnection between Ottoman identity and Islam, they were often more insistent upon the conversion of their wives.56 It may have also been the case that the family of “the Turk living in Buda” was religiously split, which was a common strategy among the Balkan peoples living under Ottoman authority.57

Of course Mrs. Csiszár may not have been able to make a clear distinction between Muslims and Eastern Orthodox, which assumption is supported not only by the mixed religion of new-Muslims from the Balkan, but also by the shifting perception of Eastern Ortodox people in Hungary. She had likely encountered people of the Eastern Orthodox faith during her life in the Partium region, where by the sixteenth century Hungarians, Romanians, Serbs and Bosnians had long lived together.58 The Western Church officially referred to Eastern Christians as schismatics (scismatici), though they were often called heretics and pagans at this time as well.59 A letter to the papal office of the Penitentiary in 1512 asking for the legalization of Tamás Tót’s second marriage stated, for example, that his first wife, Magdolna Rachaz, had “left Tamás and, guided by an evil spirit and forgetting about the salvation of her soul, run off to a pagan and schismatic with whom she united in marriage, which they consummated.”60

Who might Magdolna’s “pagan and schismatic” husband have been? An increasing number of Romanians, Eastern Orthodox South Slavs (Bulgarians, Serbs, and Bosnians) moving northbound from the Turks as well as Hussite “heretics” from the north and Patarenes and Bogomils from the south took refuge in the Csanád Diocese in which Magdolna and Tamás lived, particularly in the southern portion of the district.61 As a result of the Catholic missionary activity, the number of converted Catholics from among the new immigrants was considerable. “Turkish” soldiers who made incursions across the Hungarian–Ottoman border along the lower Danube were either Eastern Orthodox or converted Muslims. Magdolna Rachaz’s new “pagan and schismatic” husband may well have been a South Slav conqueror who had converted from Eastern Orthodoxy to Islam, though an Eastern Orthodox Romanian or South Slav seems a more likely possibility. The surname of Magdolna’s first husband, Tót, was used in Hungarian to refer to Slovaks, Slovenes and Croats, thus indicating that he might have also been a South Slav who had converted to Catholicism. Although her abandoned husband accused her of “apostasy,” Magdolna had consequently may have just returned to her original religion and ethnic community.

Mátyás, the son of Lőrinc Antusui, crossed the boundary separating religions and ethnicities not in flight from a bad marriage, but from an Observant Franciscan cloister in Transylvania: 

He went among the pagans, where passing himself off as a pagan he married Axpianna, a pagan woman of another religion. They consummated the marriage conducted according to the customs and rituals of his wife’s religion. However, the fear then overtook him that it might become known that he was, in fact, a Christian and they would therefore try to take his life. Though his conscience also inspired him to leave his pagan wife and come to Rome. 

 

In Rome, Mátyás asked the pope to annul both his monastic vow and his marriage because he wanted to marry a Christian woman.62 I believe that Mátyás probably did not flee to Ottoman lands, but moved to a Romanian-inhabited territory within Transylvania or, perhaps, to one of the adjacent Romanian principalities. In this case, the paganus that Mátyás had married was likely an Eastern Orthodox Romanian rather than a Muslim.

In Mátyás’s story, geographical mobility and the traversing of boundaries between cultures represented a conscious survival strategy and a means of taking cover. Dissimulation and the change of identity, achieved by disguising himself as a “pagan” and, subsequently, as a “Christian” were also part of this survival strategy. For others, conversion between Eastern and Latin Christianity served as a vehicle for social advancement. Margit, daughter of the late János Nadabor Hunyadi, travelled from Transylvania to Rome in 1517 in order to petition at the Office of the Apostolic Penitentiary for permission to marry Nan, the son of Dan Bérci Török (Naan filio Daan Thererk de Beercz). Nan was not only a distant cousin, but a “schismatic” who, based on his Christian name, was likely Romanian. Margit requested that the marriage be permitted despite their kinship because Nan would thus be won over to the Catholic faith and Jesus Christ (orthodoxe fidei et Domino nostro Jhesu Christo lucrifacto), that is, he would be baptized as a Latin Christian.63 Margit was taking the prescriptions of canon law into account when she promised that her schismatic fiancé would be rebaptized in the course of marriage. The Roman Church did not recognize the validity of marriages to non-Christians, a category to which Eastern Christians belonged.64

However, in addition to the Church, Hungarian secular authority also expected Margit’s fiancé to be rebaptized as a Catholic. King Sigismund issued a decree in 1428 that was intended to promote the conversion of Eastern Orthodox Romanians and South Slavs living in Transylvania and the “South Country” (Délvidék), who frequently allied themselves with the Turks, through the prohibition of baptisms conducted by Eastern Orthodox priests and the requirement that all Eastern Rite Christians be baptized pursuant to Catholic ritual upon marriage to a Latin Rite Christian.65 Matthias Corvinus enacted a similar measure in 1478, suggesting that marriages between people of different religions and ethnicities were still common at that time and served as a means of converting Romanians.66 The Nadaboris of Hunyad were distantly related Romanian kenez (cneaz in Romanian, meaning distinguished) families owning adjacent lands in Hunyad County.67 The fact that János Cseh, the husband of Margit’s sister, Anna, was a Hunyadi vice-castellan in 1515 and the familiaris of the owner of the estate, George the Brandenburg-Ansbach (1484–1543) provides an indication of the status of the Nadaboris, whose family name indicates that they were Catholic and had become Magyarized through marriage.68 The social ascent of the Nadabori family is also reflected in their land purchases. The kenez Török family also travelled along the path of enrichment from the neighboring village of Bérc.69 The marriage between the families and the conversion to Catholicism of the Eastern Orthodox spouse represented a customary strategy of ambitious Romanian noble families, one that also promoted their assimilation. István Vajda’s 1510 petition from the Várad Diocese records an instance in which Romanians living in the Partium were Catholicized in the course of marriage. Vajda, whose name suggests that he was a Romanian noble, married his “schismatic” lover following the death of his first wife.70 His new wife, Margaret of Wallachia (Margaretha Valache) was rebaptized a Catholic at the time of their marriage.71

The previous cases provide a clear reflection of instances in which the boundaries between the faiths and ethnicities of those living in the Partium, Transylvania and the South Country shifted as a result of intermarriage and religious conversion. The essential difference between the second husbands of the woman of Várad and Magdolna Rachaz lay not in their religions (new Muslim and Eastern Orthodox) and ethnic affiliations (presumably either Bosnian or Serb), but in the radical disparity in their social status. The fact that the second husband of the woman of Várad served as a representative of the Ottoman conquerors and new lords of the land indicates that she may have been the type of woman who was attracted to strong and influential men.72

The convergences and commonalities arising from religious and ethnic heterogeneity softened the differences between people living in the previously cited regions, thus making it possible for Christian women to consider marriage to a “Turkish” husband and conversion to another faith. Moreover, Mrs. Csiszár did not go abroad, but to Buda, which just a few years previously had been the capital of the Kingdom of Hungary. Perhaps she even had relatives and acquaintances living in the city. The connections between Buda and Várad manifested themselves in the large number of people who moved from the former to the latter in order to get away from the Turks.73 However, not everybody attempted to flee from the Turks when they took Buda in 1541. In 1546, the Turks registered 238 Christian (with the departure of the Germans, primarily Hungarian) families in Buda, thus making Latin Christianity the most common faith in the increasingly heterogeneous city ahead of Judaism, Islam and Eastern Orthodoxy.74 Many residents of Buda, both poor and rich, had therefore made the understandable decision to remain in the city even after it had come under Ottoman dominion. Christians living in the city were at this time still permitted to practice their faith communally, in public and with their own clergy at the Mária Magdolna Parish Church. The Turks had only prohibited the ringing of the church bells. That Mrs. Csiszár wound up in Buda is also unsurprising if one considers the fact that many of the several thousand Ottoman garrison soldiers and civil servants in the city were either single or had left their wives at home, thus increasing the local demand for women.75 Complications did, however, surface when the abandoned husband sent his men to Buda to recover property and, perhaps, even the unfaithful wife. In this event, wives who had not previously adopted the religion of their Muslim husbands could do so in order to invoke the Islamic law invalidating previous marriages in the event of conversion.76 Thus if the kadi “celebrating” marriage between a Christian woman and a Muslim man at the empires’s borderlands had not been interested in the woman’s past (her undissolved marriage) and was willing to conduct the secular rite of the Muslim wedding without her religious conversion (but in return for a fee), it was still worthwhile for her to adopt Islam.77

A Slavonian Nobleman Turning Turk

Just as the woman of Várad, István Velikei (Velika, Croatia) of Radovanc made a free and deliberate decision to stand among the Turks. At least this is what his abandoned wife, Fruzsina Kasztellánfi of Szentlélek (Sveti Duh, in Croatia) claimed. However, contrary to Ferenc Csiszár, Fruzsina, daughter of the nobleman János Kasztellánfi, turned to Catholic authorities in order to gain permission to remarry. 

Fruzsina presented two versions of her petition. The first, submitted to the Apostolic Penitentiary during the first half of 1541, was founded upon two pillars: first, that she had vowed to marry (sponsalia iuramento vallata) István Velikei of Radovanc as a minor, at the age of only nine or ten years old, though they never slept together due to her young age and she had not reconfirmed the betrothal when she had reached the age of majority; and second, that following their betrothal, her fiancé had “gone to the Turks, donned their clothing, and together with them attacked and plundered the settlements of the Christians and perhaps even delivered his own castle, Velike, into the hands of the Turks.”78 Fruzsina claimed in her first petition that she was not obliged to honor her betrothal vow because Velikei “committed adultery, keeping a Turkish woman as a concubine, who had borne him daughters”. She thus requested that, taking these circumstances into consideration, her vow of betrothal be annulled in order that she might marry another man. Fruzsina’s case was complicated by the fact that she initially submitted her petition to Bishop of Modena Johannes de Morono, who served as the papal nuncio in the royal court of King Ferdinand I of Hungary and Croatia.79 The nuncio decided that the betrothal of Fruzsina and István had, in fact, represented a valid marriage and that the remarriage of the former was therefore impermissible. The nuncio’s verdict suggests that Fruzsina, who was born around 1521,80 had been an adult at the time of her betrothal—that is, at least twelve years old. Fruzsina’s first petition therefore represented an appeal to Pope Paul III of the nuncio’s decision. 

Fruzsina submitted a second petition to the Apostolic Dataria, undoubtedly in order to increase her chances of gaining a positive decision. In light of the papal nuncio’s rejection of her first petition, this seems to have been a completely understandable and rational decision. People of Fruzsina’s social standing could afford to apply for the more expensive and authoritative Dataria permits issued with the pope’s personal seal. The Kasztellánfis, who were named after one of their two Körös County castles—either Szentléleki or Bikszádi (Bisag, Croatia)—were an old and locally distinguished family of medium-range land owners.81 Fruzsina, though she identified herself as a simple noble (nobilis) in her petition, in fact bore the title of egregius, or “well-to-do noble,” as the daughter of János Kasztellánfi of Szentlélek and Barbara Ősi.82 Her father—who by 1541 was no longer living—had stood in royal military service in addition to performing the family’s customary county-level offices and serving as the familiaris of an aristocrat.83

We know of Fruzsina’s second petition only through the apostolic response to it: in March 1542, the Pope Paul III instructed Bishop of Zagreb Simon Erdődy to invalidate the betrothal. This decision was exceptionally favorable for the petitioner because it did not call for further examination of the case as was customary. We do not know if somebody intervened personally at the papal court on behalf of Fruzsina or if the arguments contained in her petition had alone convinced the pope to order that her betrothal be annulled. Her story was framed in this second petition completely differently. It portrayed the marriage not as an affair between two individuals, Fruzsina and István, but in a more accurate reflection of actual events as a family matter. The head of the family, János Kasztellánfi, played the primary role in organizing the first marriage rather than Fruzsina, herself. The petition clearly reveals that Kasztellánfi gave his daughter to the neighboring noble from Pozsega (Požega, Croatia) before she had reached adulthood. The two families knew each other well, their estates were located close to one another and they were related by marriage via the most prominent family in the region, the Szencseis.84 The Velikeis held parts of Velike and Petnyevára castles, though evidence suggests that by this time these portions had begun to decrease since the daughters inherited them following the extinction of the male line and they had thus become very much in demand.85 The kinship between the Radovancis and the Velikeis of Pozsega also emerged as a result of such a marriage: at the end of the fifteenth century, the royal chancellery notary, László Radovánci, married Dorottya Velikei.86 This Kasztellánfi–Velikei marriage therefore may have served to strengthen the alliance between two families of relatively equal status.87

In the case of the prestigious noble family from Slavonia, parental compulsion was not an issue: according to the established custom, the father made the decision about the marriage of his young daughter. Fruzsina’s petition does not mention a single word about the fact that she had not yet reached the recognized age of adulthood and had not consummated their marriage upon betrothal (which were important arguments against the validity of their matrimony in her first petition). In the system of arranged marriages this was considered to be self-evident. And of course it was also the father who, according to the petition, had “wanted to defend the honor of his daughter and give her in marriage to another” following the apostasy and betrayal of the husband he had selected for her. It remains a question why he chose to request the papal nuncio rather than the locally competent Bishop of Zagreb, Simon Erdődy, who, as he, was a supporter of King Ferdinand I, that the marriage be officially annulled.. Anyway, it turned out to be an unwise decision. The father of Fruzsina died in the interval between the submission of the two petitions. However, Fruzsina remained a minor figure in the narrative of the second petition as well, playing a secondary role to her widowed mother. Fruzsina’s old widowed mother, as the petition that won papal approval stated, cannot herself take care of six young children and at the same time defend three castles— Szentlélek,88 Bikszád and Zelnyak (Sirač, Croatia)—under threat from the Turks, which if lost, would gravely undermine the security of the region. She therefore needed a forceful and energetic son-in-law to be the husband of her seventh child and eldest daughter, Fruzsina. Barbara Ősi, who oversaw the affairs of her large family with extraordinary skill, thus presented herself as a hapless widow in the request for the pope’s annulment of her daughter’s marriage. While playing the role of the “miserrima orphana,” she gained the backing of one of the most prestigious aristocratic families in the region, the Batthyánys, in the defense of her property and support of her children.89

As a result of the fiancé’s betrayal, the family context in the petition became interconnected with the issue of defending Christianity. The narrative supplemented with new details the story of the fiancé turning Turk: yielding to the temptation of the Turks, István abandoned not only the Catholic faith that he had received upon baptism, but when the Ottomans invaded the territory in which Pozsega was located in 1536, he delivered provisions to the attackers and even ceded to them his own, well-fortified Velike castle, in betrayal of the relatives with whom he held joint possession of the stronghold; moreover, István adopted a Turkish voivode as his brother and maintained friendly relations with many Turks.90 The pope’s annulment of Fruzsina’s marriage so that she could wed a Catholic man therefore served to not only to preserve her personal honor and that of family, but to promote the interests of Christianity in general. 

Fruzsina’s marital affair could presumably be depicted as an issue related to the overall state of the Christian faith because the fall of the capital of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, Buda, on August 19, 1541, has awakened European public opinion and decision makers to the magnitude of the Turkish threat: in the spring of 1542, when Fruzsina’s case appeared before the pope in Rome, the German imperial estates in Speyer were discussing the issue of the Turkish aid (Türkenhilfe). This common trauma may well have guided the pen of both the author of the petition—likely Fruzsina’s widowed mother for the most part—as well as that of the adjudicator, Pope Paul III and his officials. Although Pozsega had long suffered the depredations of the Turks, it suffered its greatest losses in 1536 and 1537, when the Ottomans again ravaged the region, defeating the armies of King Ferdinand I near the River Gara early in the latter year and took Pozsegavár (Slavonska Požega, Croatia) located just 20 kilometers south of Velike.91 However, it was not until the fall of Buda in 1541 that the fate of the southern region of Pozsega became a matter of European importance and István Velikei, who had “removed his Christian clothing and dressed as a Turk” and maintained a Turkish concubine, was deemed unworthy of marriage to a Christian woman. 

There are several morals to this story. First, as the cases in Várad also demonstrated, official control of marriages functioned efficiently even amid the conditions of civil war. The calculation of the Kasztellánfis that the fiancé’s turning Turk would be an effective argument in favor of dissolving the marital bond in the first case proved mistaken. The papal nuncio in Vienna, acting in accordance with canon law, did not permit the disgraced girl to remarry. We thus see again the family and the girl who wanted to remarry locally in a difficult position. This story likewise clearly demonstrates how giving daughters in marriage was an important tool of forging family alliances of the landed nobility. It is furthermore clear that even if we do not know what truly happened, Velikei was portrayed as a trickster crossing Christian–Muslim boundaries with ease. Since the petitioners aspired to maintain their authenticity, people who transformed their personal identity, joining the Ottoman conquerors, converting to their religion and living with their women, must have been familiar figures of the time.

The description of the process of conversion conforms to that which is known about it, thus increasing the authenticity of the narrative. In this case as well, outsiders were able to discern religious conversion primarily in terms of external factors. In both of her petitions, Fruzsina mentions that Velikei “dressed as a Turk, abandoning his Christian clothing.” At other times they referred to the change of names in connection to the change of religions.92 It is a well-known fact that adoption of a Muslim name constituted part of the formal, though very simple, rite of switching religions: following the pronouncement of the one-sentence confession of faith, the assumption of a Muslim name symbolized a break with the past and the rebirth of the individual in question in the true religion. The newly converted then received gifts, among them, according to long-established custom, clothes.93 The perception of outsiders actually offers a clear reflection of the essence of the process of conversion, which in practice consisted solely of external forms and appearances. Contrary to the ideals and practices of Christian conversion, adoption of Islam did not require internal transformation: the Muslim community did not attempt to determine the motives or sincerity of those who converted to Islam, requiring only that converts followed their customs.94 Ottoman Muslims did everything under their power to integrate newcomers: not only did they provide them with clothing and monetary gifts, but also attempted to promote their integration through provision of a spouse and material livelihood.95 The complaints of the Kasztellánfis regarding the converted Velikei also reflect the receptive behavior of the Ottomans that facilitated conversion to Islam: “he adopted as his brother (in fratrem sibi iuravit) a voivoide, a leader of the Turks and to such an extent behaves on friendly terms with him and other Turks.”96

The integrative attitude of the Ottomans must have smoothed the conversion of István Velikei. But what prompted the Pozsega noble to leave his family and property behind in order to stand among the Turks? The story of the abandoned fiancée suggests that his decision was drive by the prospect of social and economic advancement. He obviously weighed his prospects in the Christian world at the frontier of the advancing Ottoman Empire and determined that he had better career opportunities as a Turk. Velikei had two choices: flee to territory that was better defended from the Ottomans, thus abandoning his lands in Pozsega; or remain in place.97 Unlike the majority of nobles, he chose the latter option. Family memory may have played a role in Velikei’s decision to cooperate with the conquerors rather than resist: two generations previously, one of his distant relatives, Katalin Velikei, was the wife of Prince Radivoj, the illegitimate brother of King Stephen Thomas of Bosnia and claimant to the throne.98 Following the seizure of Jajce in 1463, which brought the Kingdom of Bosnia to an end, the victors executed Radivoj. Though this is just speculation, relinquishing the castle of Velike, the ancient family base, to the Turks may have actually represented a means of reacquiring the castle within the context of a conflict between members of the family. Unfortunately, we do not know if István Velikei’s decision to join the Turks served to promote his interests in the Ottoman Sanjak of Pojega formed around the year 1538.99

Conclusion

Historians argue based on their knowledge of renegade life-histories in the Mediterranean region that women most often converted to Islam for family reasons, while men most often did so to gain greater socioeconomic opportunity.100 However, individual strategies were more complex than this. On the one hand, marriage was an important channel of upward social mobility. Was the wife of Ferenc Csiszár driven primarily by emotions or material prospects when she chose a more influential and wealthy Turkish husband in Buda?101 The nobleman of Pozsega, on the other hand, may have regarded conversion to Islam as a means of regaining possession of family property. I would therefore contend that traversing the Christian–Muslim boundary provided women with the possibility to achieve radical social advancement that would have been otherwise inconceivable. Both men and women who were willing to cooperate with the new proprietors of power were able to switch faiths in the interest of security and social improvement.102 For women, marriage represented the gateway to crossing the boundary in the course of transforming their identities.

The figure of the woman exchanging her Christian marriage for a Muslim one also helps us to take a more nuanced approach to the issue of female agency. Mrs. Csiszár acted autonomously and outside of social expectations when she escaped her husband. The fact that she immediately remarried, however, challenges the often underlying scholarly assumption that women, independent of time and place, strove to break loose from their subordination to men within the patriarchal family.103 Her empowered position to negotiate new social relations and change her life—similar to that of women converting before sharia courts in Istanbul in order to divorce104—was temporary. This enabled women to rid themselves of problematic husbands; however as the wife of a Muslim man in the Islamic world, it also brought them under an even greater degree of control. Although escape was an act of exerting their free will, it did not represent an attempt to gain independence: to the contrary, flight from a man whose violation of the norms of husband–wife relations assumed dangerous proportions provided women with protection and security alongside another man, even if his Muslim religion served to curtail her rights in comparison to those she had possessed in the Christian world.

The optimistic view of female agency becomes further “tamed” if one acknowledges that the meeting of cultures and religions offered greater room for maneuver to both men and women who were endowed with sufficient daring and the ability to orient themselves within the system of legal and institutional plurality, though this change was more conspicuous and surprising in the case of women due to the traditional notion of their greater passivity. We observed this situation when women attempted to escape an unwanted marriage. Some such women moved far away from their previous place of residence and remarried abroad, thus evading Christian marriage regulations; while others, those who faced different conditions, among them the wife of Ferenc Csiszár, relocated to the Ottoman world, where they could legally remarry. We also observed the factors that enabled these individuals to become boundary-crossers. The ethnic and religious diversity of the eastern and southern regions of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, primarily the daily coexistence of Latin and Eastern Christians, as well as the receptive behavior of the Ottoman-Turks who appeared in these regions made it possible to cross the Christian–Muslim boundaries and to thereby transform personal identity.

Further research is necessary to explore the actions of rational and well-informed individuals who were able to exploit the differences in the Christian and Islamic systems of norms in order to increase the security and stability of their lives and improve their socioeconomic status by turning Turk. Also, it seems more fruitful to focus our attention on the mediating role of Christian women marrying Muslim men and to observe the ways in which such mixed marriages shaped the boundaries of divergences and similarities between cultures in clash.

 

Archival Sources

Archivio Poenitentiaria Apostolica (Roma), Registra Matrimonialium et Diversorum [APA].

Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Dataria Apostolica, Brevia Lateranensia  

 

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (MNL OL)

Mohács előtti Gyűjtemény (DLDF)

Libri Regii (A 57)

Batthyány család levéltára, Missiles  (P 1314)

 

 

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Balogh, Jolán. Varadinum. Várad Vára. 2 vols. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1982.

Dávid, Géza. Pasák és bégek uralma alatt [Under the Rule of Pashas and Beys]. Budapest: Akadémiai, 2005.

Dursteler, Eric. Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.

Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, ed. Suad Joseph. Vol. 1. Methodologies, Paradigms and Sources. Leiden: Brill, 2003.

Fariba, Zarinebaf-Shahr, “Women, Law and Imperial Justice in Ottoman Istanbul in the Late Seventeenth Century. ” In Women, the Family and Divorce Laws in Islamic History, edited by Amira El Azhary Sonbol, 81−95. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

Fekete, Lajos. Budapest a török korban [Budapest under Ottoman Rule]. Budapest: Királyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda, 1944.

Fodor, Pál and Géza Dávid, eds., Ransom Slavery along the Ottoman Borders. Leiden: Brill, 2007.

Fodor, Pál. “‘A kincstár számára a hitetlen a leghasznosabb.’ Az oszmánok magyarországi valláspolitikájáról” [‘The Infidel’s Benefits for the Treasury.’ On the Religious Policy of the Ottomans in Hungary]. In idem. Szülejmán szultántól Jókai Mórig. Tanulmányok az oszmán-török hatalom szerkezetéről és a magyar–török érintkezésekről [From Sultan Süleyman to Mór Jókai: Studies on the Structure of Ottoman-Turkish Power and Hungarian–Ottoman Encounters], 258–71. Budapest: MTA BTK, 2014.

Hegyi, Klára. “Etnikum, vallás, iszlamizáció. A budai vilájet várkatonaságának eredete és utánpótlása” [Ethnicity, Religion, and Islamization. The Origins and Reserves of the Garrison of the Eyalet of Buda], Történelmi Szemle 40 (1998): 229–56. 

Hegyi, Klára. “Kereszténység és iszlám az Oszmán Birodalom balkáni és magyar tartományaiban” [Christianity and Islam in the Hungarian and Balkan States of the Ottoman Empire], Korunk 7 (1996): 32–42.

Hegyi, Klára. Egy birodalom végvidékén [On the Borderland of an Empire]. Budapest: Gondolat, 1976.

Hegyi, Klára. Török berendezkedés Magyarországon [Ottoman-Turkish Rule in Hungary]. Budapest: MTA TTI, 1995.

Hegyi, Klára. A török hódoltság várai és várkatonasága [The Castles and Garrisons of Ottoman Hungary]. 2 vols. Budapest: MTA, 2007.

Jennings, Donald C. “Women in the Early Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Judicial Records: The Sharia court of Anatolian Kayseri,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 18 (1975): 53−114.

Kimondhatatlan nyomorúság. Két emlékirat a 15–16. századi oszmán fogságról [Misery Beyond Description. Two Memoirs on Ottoman Captivity in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries]. Edited by Erik Fügedi. Budapest: Európa, 1976.

Kovács, Sándor V., ed. Mátyás király levelei 1460–1490 [Letters of King Matthias]. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1986.

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Maček, Pavao, and Ivan Jurković. Rodoslov Plemića I Baruna Kaštelanovića od Svetog Huda (od 14. do 17. stoljeća). Slavonski Brod: n.p., 2009.

Minkov, Anton. Conversion to Islam in the Balkans: Kisve Bahas ¸Petitions and Ottoman Social Life, 1670–1730. Leiden: Brill, 2004.

Moačanin, Nenad. “Mass Islamization of Peasants in Bosnia: Demystifications.” In Melanges Prof. Machiel Kiel, ed. Abdeljelil Temini, 353–58. Zaghouan: Fondation Temimi pour la Recherche Scientifique et l’Information, 1999. 

Molnár, Antal. “Jezsuita misszió Karánsebesen (1625–1642)” [Jesuit Mission in Karánsebes]. Történelmi Szemle 47 (1999): 127–56.

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Péter, Katalin. “Női családfők Sárospatakon a 16. és a 17. században,” [Female Heads of Household in the Market Town of Sárospatak in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries]. Századok 123 (1989): 563−604.  

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Sz. Simon, Éva. “Flight or Submission: Changing Identities in the Ottoman–Hungarian Borderlands. The County of Zala in the 1570s.” In Osmanischer Orient und Ostmitteleuropa, ed. Robert Born and Andreas Puth, 33−46. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2014.

Szakály, Ferenc. “A gyöngyösi ispotály-per 1667−1668-ban (A ‘törökösség’ fogalmának értelmezéséhez)” [The Hospital Trial in Gyöngyös in 1667−1668. The Interpretation of the Notion of ‘Turcismus’]. Archivum. A Heves Megyei Levéltár Közleményei 10 (1981): 5–26. Szakály, Ferenc. Magyar adóztatás a török hódoltságban [Hungarian Taxation in Ottoman Hungary]. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1981.

Szakály, Ferenc. Szigetvári Csöbör Balázs török miniatúrái, 1570 [The Turkish Miniatures of Balázs Csöbör of Szigetvár]. Budapest: Európa 1983.

Takáts, Sándor. Rajzok a török világból. 2 vols. Budapest: MTA, 1915–17.

Thuri, Pál Farkas. “Idea Christianorum Hungarorum in et sub Turcismo [1556–57].” In Géza Kathona, Fejezetek a török hódoltsági reformáció történetéből [Chapters from the History of the Reformation in Ottoman Hungary], 61–69. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1974.

Brian Sandberg

Going Off to the War in Hungary: French Nobles and Crusading Culture in the Sixteenth Century

 

Crusading culture played a significant role in the conceptions and practices of religious warfare in the Early Modern Period, as French authors and militant nobles redeployed Hungary as a crucial theater of crusading war. Examining crusading warfare in Hungary reveals new facets of warrior nobles’ military activities in early modern France and abroad, building on recent studies of French noble culture. The article concludes that French readers developed notions of crusading warfare in part through reports of the war in Hungary, contributing to a burgeoning literature on the production, diffusion, and reception of early modern news and information across Europe.

 

Keywords: crusading warfare, Early Modern Hungary, French nobles, noble culture.

 

Louis de Gonzague, duc de Nevers, lamented the disastrous defeat of the Hungarian army at the battle of Mohács (1526) in a treatise written during the French Wars of Religion (1562–1629), as Catholics and Calvinists engaged in intense sectarian fighting within France. 1 The duc de Nevers focused especially on the tragic death of Louis II Jagiellon, King of Hungary: “Louis was killed there with twenty thousand Christians, and so Hungary—which had served as a bulwark for Christianity against the Muslims for more than 150 years—was reduced nearly completely to obedience to the Turk.”2 Despite the ongoing religious conflict and civil war within France during the second half of the sixteenth century, nobles such as the duc de Nevers dreamed of Hungary. Many French nobles readily engaged in crusading warfare against the Ottomans, fighting in various campaigns in Hungary and in Southeastern Europe during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The history of crusading after the Crusades has become an important subject of research, in large part due to Alphonse Dupront’s extraordinary influence on the field of religious studies and to the curious history of three unpublished theses. Dupront defended his doctoral thesis, “Le mythe de croisade. Étude de sociologie religieuse,” in 1956, at a time when religious history was relatively marginalized in a French academic landscape that was dominated by Marxist and structuralist approaches to the humanities. The thesis remained unpublished, while its author went on to direct research at the Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and to found its Centre d’Anthropologie Religieuse Européenne in 1972. Dupront eventually published another work, Du Sacré: croisades et pèlerinages (1987), which drew fresh attention to his research.3 The thesis itself was finally published four decades after its defense, and in a heavily revised form, as Le mythe de croisade (1997).4 In this magisterial four-volume work, Dupront constructs an extremely unconventional history of the idea of crusading, examining the “creation of a collective spirit of crusade, and thus, in the corporeal and natural sense of the word, a myth. This myth where, as in life, the realities, and dreams, the unsatiated needs get mixed up together and confused.”5 For Dupront, the early modern period represented a significant period in the transformation of the “crusading myth” that is best understood through what he calls an “existential” approach to “convergences” in the history of ideas.6

Dupront’s elaboration of an anthropology of religion has become very influential, and his work on the “crusading myth” has spurred new research and debates on crusading warfare in early modern Europe and the Mediterranean.7 The remarkable doctoral theses of Péter Sahin-Tóth and Guy Le Thiec—which were both written and defended in the 1990s, but unfortunately remain unpublished—respond directly to Alphonse Dupront’s work. Le Thiec’s massive four-volume thesis, entitled “‘Et il n’y aura qu’un seul troupeau…’ L’imaginaire de la confrontation entre Turcs et Chrétiens dans l’art figuratif en France et en Italie de 1453 aux années 1620,” meticulously examines early modern visual and textual sources depicting the Ottomans.8 Le Thiec presents vital evidence of French and European images of the Turks, proposing a complicated and ambivalent history of the construction of the “Turkish peril” and of crusading warfare. In “La France et les français face à la ‘Longue Guerre’ de Hongrie (1591–1606),” Péter Sahin-Tóth offers a crucial case study of French noble volunteers who traveled to Hungary to fight against the Ottomans.9 Sahin-Tóth, working in the mid-1990s, consulted Dupront’s then still-unpublished dissertation at the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne and then offered a substantial critique of its interpretive framework in his own thesis, which Sahin-Tóth defended in the same year that Dupront’s Le mythe de croisade was finally published in 1997. Sadly, Sahin-Tóth was unable to publish his thesis as a book prior to his tragic death in 2004.10

My analysis of French crusading culture draws on the work of Dupront, Le Thiec, and Sahin-Tóth, and also attempts to set them into dialogue with each other. Robert Sauzet, who co-directed Sahin-Tóth’s dissertation, has since published his own historicized exploration of seventeenth-century crusading warfare by placing it into the context of the growing Catholic Reformation in France in Au Grand Siècle des âmes (2007). Sauzet refers to the “nostalgies de croisade,” or crusading nostalgia, that became popular in early modern French political culture.11 This article approaches the problem of crusading warfare from another angle, questioning whether French crusading culture really developed exclusively within a mythic or nostalgic mode. Le Thiec and Sahin-Tóth’s studies signal the need for further analysis of French nobles’ military service in Hungary and of contemporary writings about crusading experiences.

Contemporary correspondence, memoirs, and other writings conserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Archives Nationales, and various Archives départementales in France furnish evidence of French nobles’ experiences of crusading warfare in Hungary and Southeastern Europe. These sources demonstrate that French nobles were significant historical actors in shaping crusading culture and crafting images of their Ottoman enemies. French- and Italian-language sources from the Archivio di Stato di Firenze contain additional accounts of crusading warfare in Hungary during the Long War of 1593–1606. I analyze French crusading culture by juxtaposing manuscript sources from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with contemporary prints and pamphlets that provided French readers with news of distant crusading warfare against the Ottomans.

My interpretation of crusading warfare in Hungary also draws on more recent research in several distinct historical fields whose historiographies often remain isolated from one another. Recent research on early modern Hungary and Transylvania provides an expanded understanding of the broader political and military contexts for crusading warfare in Southeastern Europe.12 New studies of the Habsburg composite state and the Holy Roman Empire permit a deeper understanding of the crusading projects in Hungary.13 A growing historiography on the political and military organization of the early modern Ottoman Empire supplies alternative perspectives on warfare in Hungary.14 French portrayals of Hungary as a crusading space can now be considered in comparison with evidence of Ottoman conceptions of empire and territoriality.15 Finally, a rich and diverse historiography on conflict and coexistence in the early modern Mediterranean allows a more nuanced interpretation of Christian–Muslim warfare.16

I argue that crusading culture played a significant role in the conceptions and practices of religious warfare in the early modern period, as French authors and militant nobles redeployed Hungary as a crucial theater of crusading war. Examining crusading warfare in Hungary reveals new facets of warrior nobles’ military activities in early modern France and abroad, building on recent studies of French noble culture.17 Considering French nobles’ experiences of crusading war permits a reassessment of the position of crusading narratives and images within broader French political culture.18 The article concludes that French readers developed notions of crusading warfare in part through reports of the war in Hungary, contributing to a burgeoning literature on the production, diffusion, and reception of early modern news and information across Europe.19

French Crusading Imagination

Chivalric romances and chansons de geste had long shaped the ideals of French nobles, but changing historical circumstances and printed literary works expanded greatly the models for the perfect chevalier beginning in the fifteenth century.20 The rapid expansion of the Ottoman Empire in southeastern Europe and Sultan Mehmet II’s dramatic conquest of Constantinople in 1453 provided a new focus for French crusading culture. Some illuminations presented the siege through depictions of assaults on the vaunted walls of Constantinople, which had been considered among the most impressive fortifications in the fifteenth-century world. These scenes emphasized swords, polearms, crossbows, bows-and-arrows, and stones as the principal weapons employed in the fighting. Such scenes presented a mirror image of well-established tropes representing Christian crusader victories in the Holy Land—here depicting the Ottomans ascending ladders and overwhelming Christian defenders.21 One of the most iconic illuminated manuscripts instead presented a new form of siege warfare by focusing the Ottoman camps, galleys, siege lines, and bombards—offering French audiences an alternative vision of a novel form of warfare and a new enemy.22 Constantinople now represented a new site for crusading campaigns in the French and broader European imaginaries of holy war.

Visual representations and textual narratives of the siege of Constantinople proliferated in Europe in the decades after Mehmet’s conquest, even if the transition to Ottoman rule was probably less dramatic than these lamentations would lead readers to believe.23 These works established what I have referred to as a “religious drama of the siege,” which influenced European narratives of the conflicts between Christians and Muslims throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.24 Narrative and descriptive elements that appeared in the accounts of the epic siege of Constantinople became replicated in accounts of later attacks on cities such as Negroponte in 1470, which was “one of the first events in Renaissance history to be recorded in print more-or-less immediately after the fact,” according to Margaret Meserve.”25 News pamphlets and siege narratives played an important role in early print media. Andrew Pettegree argues that “these publications, though generally originating in Italy, achieved a remarkable geographic range. The crusading writings of Cardinal Bessarion were among the first books published in France.”26 A growing urban audience for printed news across Europe read accounts of the Ottoman attacks on Otranto and Rhodes in 1480. When the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem defended Rhodes against a besieging Ottomans army in 1522, Italian printers produced numerous pamphlets and maps relating the siege, which were then diffused in France.27 The battles and sieges fought between Christian and Ottoman forces were increasingly reported in short pamphlets, printed in octavo format, as printing presses experimented with inexpensive editions intended for broad readerships and gradually developed news publishing.28

In the aftermath of the Ottoman conquests of Constantinople and Rhodes, the Kingdom of Hungary became one of the principal lines of Christian defense against the Ottoman advance. Artists signified Hungary’s new position as a bulwark against the Ottomans through portrayals of Hungarians fighting against Turkish soldiers.29 Scenes of “Turkish cruelties” established lasting iconographic conventions depicting Ottomans soldiers as barbarous, monstrous infidels.30 Narrative tropes quickly emerged in textual sources to describe the combats between Christians and the Ottomans in Hungary. French nobles developed associations between Christian brotherhood and Christian defense that referred not to the Holy Land, but to battlefields in Southeastern Europe.

New pieces of crusading literature updated legendary chivalric figures for sixteenth-century audiences. A French prose translation of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, which had originally been published in 1516, appeared in 1544.31 Herberay des Essarts adapted and translated Amadis de Gaule, a chivalric romance that had originally been published in Spanish in 1533, producing an eight-volume series printed from 1540 to 1548.32 Amadis de Gaule became such a major best-seller that other authors and translators extended the series throughout the second half the sixteenth century and into the early seventeenth century.33 These chivalric romances promoted visions of bellicose deeds, but other genres also contributed to French attitudes toward crusading war.

French crusading literature and artistic works drew on broader European tropes of the “terrible Turk” and the “Turkish peril.”34 French chronicles and histories established a long lineage of crusading warfare by setting the Ottomans into a continuous progression of Muslim “infidel” enemies. Guillaume Aubert’s L’histoire des guerres faictes par les chrestiens contre les turcs... (1559) provided a prehistory of the struggle against the Turks—beginning with the birth of Muhammad, continuing with the rise of the Saracens, and culminating with the Crusades.35 Chronicles and artworks celebrated the crusades of Louis IX, or Saint-Louis. One popular theme was the Byzantine Emperor’s gift of the Crown of Thorns to Saint-Louis and its installation in the Sainte-Chapelle on the île de la Cité in Paris.36 A sixteenth-century treatise on the rise and fall of states referred to the impressive power of the Ottomans: “Among all the things that we admire today, there is nothing so marvelous as the fortune of the Ottomans, with the progress of their greatness.”37

French crusading culture may have been “orientalist” is certain ways, but was much more varied, complicated, and political than Edward Said’s famous theory of Orientalism allows. Said insists that “from the end of the seventh century until the battle of Lepanto in 1571, Islam in either its Arab, Ottoman, or North African and Spanish form dominated or effectively threatened European Christianity. That Islam outstripped and outshone Rome cannot have been absent from the mind of any European past or present.”38 Guy Le Thiec effectively challenges Said’s interpretation by demonstrating the diversity and complexity of European images of the Turks. Although European authors and artists described Ottoman sultans as terrible, feroces, and cruel, they also presented this cruelty as linked to tyranny, suggesting that the Ottoman domination was both rational and ephemeral. Indeed, Le Thiec presents ample evidence that many Europeans envisioned a role in toppling Ottoman tyrannical rule: “the Turkish tyranny, which threatened to expand in Europe and to block the Catholic project of converting infidels, became a power to combat and convert.”39 Prophesies, prognostications, and theatrical performances promoted crusading efforts against the Ottomans, demonizing the Turks and offering assurances that the end of “infidel” rule was near.40

Crusading ideals were not simply confined to literary works, since French nobles were active producers and consumers of crusading culture. Many of the grands, or great nobles, responded to calls to fight the “infidel” by planning personal crusades or elaborate military ventures. French nobles were already accustomed to supporting religio-political causes by engaging their honor as nobles volontaires, or noble volunteers, and offering their military service. French nobles who served as volunteers were often simply referred to in sources as la noblesse, because they did not have stable military offices or charges.41 When French nobles traveled abroad to join crusading forces in Hungary, they often attached themselves to military commanders and their entourages or formed their own cavalry companies.42 Infantry and cavalry companies from France, Lorraine, Flanders, and other Francophone regions periodically joined Imperial armies fighting against the Ottomans.43

Many French nobles viewed crusading as a special obligation of the French king and his nobles. Members of the Valois royal family, and later the Bourbons, actively promoted crusading projects through military orders, artistic works, and printed publications. The Valois dynasty furthered crusading ideals through the activities of the Ordre de Saint-Michel, which had been created in 1469. Henri III created the Ordre du Saint-Esprit, or Order of the Holy Spirit, in 1578.44 According to Nicolas Le Roux, Henri III aimed to forge a common “religious and moral ideal” for Catholic nobles, but the military order simultaneously promoted a recharged Catholic militancy that would prove difficult to control.45 French kings also provided support for the crusading activities of Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, whose members became popularly known as the chevaliers de Malte, or Knights of Malta after their relocation from Rhodes following the 1522 siege.46 The Knights of Malta promoted a crusading spirit in their own ranks, but also encouraged Christian princes to support their efforts and engage their own forces in combat against Muslims.47

The expansion of the Ottoman empire, the growth of news reporting, and the spread of Protestantism all transformed the French notions of crusade significantly during the sixteenth century, as Hungary became fully incorporated into French crusading culture. French crusading activities became more narrowly associated with a specifically Catholic combat against the Ottomans, rather than a common defense by all Christians. As Reformation movements spread into France in the 1520s and 1530s, the growing threat of heresy brought comparisons between the “infidel” Turks with the Huguenot “heretics” within the kingdom. Such associations would flourish in crusading literature once religious warfare erupted in France in the mid-sixteenth century.48

The remainder of this article will focus on discussions of Hungary in French crusading culture at three distinct moments: the battle of Mohács of 1526, the Hungarian campaign of 1566, and the Habsburg–Ottoman War of 1593–1606. An analysis of these Hungarian cases will reveal shifting sixteenth-century French perceptions of Hungary as a crusading battleground, allowing us to re-examine contemporary notions of crusading warfare.

The Battle of Mohács, 1526

Sultan Süleyman I led a major Ottoman field army to invade Hungary in 1526, overwhelming a Hungarian army at Mohács and occupying much of the kingdom. King Louis II of Hungary drowned as he attempted to flee from the battlefield, leading to the collapse of the Jagiellon rule in Hungary. Géza Pálffy argues that “the battle meant more than just the end of the territorial integrity of the realm of St. Stephen. It was a major change in the history of central Europe just as the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 had meant a major change for all of eastern Europe.”49 Shocking news of the disastrous battle circulated throughout Europe through Italian and German pamphlets.50 If French printers produced pamphlets narrating the battle, none seem to have survived—perhaps because the French news publishing was still in its infancy or because of the political crisis in France following the capture of King François I at the battle of Pavia in 1525.51 Nonetheless, the memory of Mohács gradually entered into French narratives of crusading warfare.

Later sources progressively constructed a detailed narrative of the battle of Mohács as illustrating essential facets of a crusading tale. Martin Fumée’s historical account of Mohács, written in 1595, referred to the “piteous history of the loss and ruin of the kingdom of Hungary, and the wars that have occurred in our time between the Christians and the Turks.”52 Accounts of the battle provided tender descriptions of the slain king’s body.53 Fumée’s presentation of the battle of Mohács focused on the cruelty of the Ottoman soldiers, describing graphically the humiliating treatment of the head of one of the Hungarian nobles killed in battle: “The next day, his head having been separated from his body, was carried all around the enemy camp as a symbol of triumph, being stuck on a lance and reportedly planted in front of Süleyman ’s tent.”54 Fumée also described the beheading of Hungarian prisoners after the battle: “The day after the battle, 1500 Hungarians who had been captured, including many of the principal nobles … were all suddenly decapitated, their blood serving as a sacrifice for these infidels.”55 Such gory accounts of Turkish atrocities became integral parts of French crusading texts.

French authors recounting the battle of Mohács explained the fall of Hungary to a weakening valor of the Hungarian nobility in the face of successive Ottoman invasions. René de Lucinge argues that in the past, Hungary had displayed “the valor of its kings and of its peoples [who were] toughened, hardened, and able to endure the rigors of war.”56 He stresses the contrast between the heroic Hungarians of previous centuries and those of the sixteenth century, who had “abandoned this first valor and bastardized the exercise of arms.”57

In the aftermath of Mohács, the Ottomans occupied southern Hungary, but the remainder of the kingdom became divided in a succession dispute among Christian princes. Ferdinand von Habsburg, younger brother of the Emperor Charles V, claimed the throne of Hungary and attracted some of the Hungarian nobility, but János Szapolyai opposed his rule and eventually sought Ottoman support.58 Few pamphlets seem to have been published in France on the confusing struggle in Hungary, perhaps because the ongoing Habsburg–Valois wars made the subject controversial.59 French readers could nonetheless follow news of Ferdinand’s entry into Székesfehérvár and his coronation on 3 November 1527.60 Ferdinand succeeded in establishing Habsburg rule in Hungary, with strong ties to the Holy Roman Empire, but the realm was effectively divided into three regions.61

Despite the ambiguous status of the Kingdom of Hungary in the wake of Mohács, French pamphlets stressed the ongoing fighting against the Ottomans. When Süleyman I’s army encircled Vienna in 1529, letters and pamphlets circulated the news of the epic siege. One French language pamphlet called for a common defense of Christianity:

 

good princes and Christian lords, do not have hearts so hardened toward each other. Form an agreement together and make the Turkish dogs, enemies of our holy faith know that you are defenders of the faith of Jesus Christ. For, if you can demonstrate your power in the face of this mean Turk, all his power cannot resist you.62

 

After a series of massive assaults, the Ottoman army finally abandoned its siege of Vienna and withdrew. Criers reported the news of the Ottoman retreat in the streets of Paris, according to one contemporary journal, which presents the retreat as “a great victory” for “Don Ferdinand, King of Hungary, brother of the Emperor,” but also one delivered by Jesus Christ, who sent a hailstorm to ravage the Ottoman troops at a critical moment. The journal relates that religious processions were held throughout Paris to give thanks to God for the salvation of Vienna and the defeat of the Turks.63

A military frontier gradually formed in Hungary, as Habsburg, Ottoman, and Transylvanian forces constructed border fortresses and fortified cities in the contested borderlands.64 After Ottoman forces took Buda in 1541, Habsburg forces began to construct a new defensive system in Hungary that was composed of border fortresses, captain generalcies, regular garrisons, and irregular troops and financed by the Habsburg monarchy.65 Meanwhile, Ottoman military and administrative officials crafted a new military frontier system of their own in Hungary.66 French pamphlets discussed the ongoing fighting in the militarized borderlands, citing Christian victories in Hungary and Transylvania.67

Representations of the military frontier in Hungary proliferated through printed city views and maps. City views by Sebastian Münster included Buda as the capital of Hungary, while later engravings by Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg prominently displayed the bastioned fortifications of cities throughout Habsburg territories and around the world.68 Printed maps and city views, including at least one siege view, depicted Hungarian communities and the military border for French audiences by the 1560s.69 One curious anthropomorphic map of Europe as a queen presents Hungary, Poland, and Lithuania as the ventre, or abdomen, of the body of Europe—suggesting its crucial position as a barrier to Ottoman expansion.70

French readers were probably unaware of the brutal realities of early modern raiding and siege warfare in Hungary, aside from stereotyped descriptions of the “cruelties” of the Turks.71 François de La Nouë deplores the “domination” of the Turks, alluding to the Christian lands conquered by the Ottomans, and insists that “against these peoples, one must draw the sword, not to convert them … but to punish them for their cruelty and tyranny.”72 French writers stressed the Austrian defense of Christianity, emphasizing that Hungary remained contested because of the efforts of the Habsburgs. René de Lucinge argues that “After the Turks came, they found the obstacle of the House of Austria, seconded by the forces of Germany, and supported by the power of the Catholic King [of Spain], who never learned to fear the Turk.”73 Lucinge laments “all these heresies” that produce divisions within Christendom, complaining especially about Calvinism’s notorious influence.74

French crusading ideals had to confront the problematic French relationship with the Ottomans, which stemmed from commercial and political negotiations beginning in 1533 and culminating in a Franco–Ottoman alliance against the Habsburgs. François I allied with sultan Süleyman I and invited the fleet of Hayreddin Barbarossa to harbor in the port of Marseille before launching joint military-naval operations to besiege Nice in 1543–44.75 Many French nobles were critical of Franco–Ottoman diplomatic relations, however. François de La Nouë, a prominent Calvinist nobleman, condemned the French alliance with the Ottomans: “if we make a comparison … of the utility of all this Turkish aide with the decrease in the renown of the French among all the nations of Europe, one would have to confess that the shame [of it] has much outweighed the profit.”76

The outbreak of the religious wars in France in 1562 created new complications for French crusading culture. The confessional fighting between Huguenots and Catholics in France reinforced associations between heretics and infidels. The French monarch’s duty as roi très chrétien to suppress heresy in the kingdom was increasingly connected with a global Catholic struggle, which encompassed the French people’s duty to fight against heresy and false belief. One source stressed:

“That as Christians we are obliged, especially since the first duty of a Christian is to maintain his religion and, according to the means that God has given him, not to put up with the practice of another contrary one. That our adversaries are in agreement with us [on this] and demonstrate that they will not put up with any other religion being practiced where they have power, as in Geneva and elsewhere. That as French people, we have a particular obligation, especially since among Christians, we call ourselves Most Christian.”77

The confessional struggle against heresy within France thus reinforced French notions of a Christian duty to uphold God’s honor and to battle against false religion. French crusading culture already presented Hungary as a sacred battleground in the war against the infidel, but French nobles and authors increasingly envisioned distant fighting against the Ottomans as closely linked to the bloody fighting against heretics within France.

The Hungarian Campaign in 1566

Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, noted that 1566 was “destined to make the French travel” as French nobles and soldiers set off to Malta, Madiera, Hungary, and other destinations to fight against the Ottomans.78 The same year, René Benoist published a pamphlet, Exhortation Chrestienne aux fideles et eslevz de Dieu, de batailler par tous moyens possiblees pour le grand Seigneur contre l’Antechrist, encouraging French nobles to engage in the great crusade against the “idolaters and infidels.”79 Sultan Süleyman I led another Ottoman field army into Hungary in the summer of 1566, prompting a large imperial mobilization and attracting many noble volunteers, including Henri de Lorraine, duc de Guise.80

Printed pamphlets circulated war news from Hungary for a public of French urban readers and listeners. Jean de Malmidy’s Discours veritable de la grand guerre, qui est au païs de Hongrie…, had provided a narrative of the previous campaign between Imperialists and Transylvanians in Hungary in 1565. The author dedicates this pamphlet to Antoine de Croy, prince de Porcian, and claims to provide an eyewitness account of the fighting.81 The focus of such pamphlets and other publications suggest tensions within crusading culture as printers increasingly specialized. There seems to have been a certain degree of competition between printers reporting on the theaters of war in Hungary and in the Mediterranean, as suggested by simultaneous reports on the fighting in Hungary and on the epic siege of Malta in 1565. After the successful Christian defense of Malta, Brantôme celebrated Jean de La Valette-Parisot, Grand Master of Malta, as one of the great captains of France, indicating that French people “are very happy and honored to have had in our nation such a great captain, who spilled the blood of the infidels and enemies of God and of our law and avenged that of Christians that was wickedly poured out by them over many years.”82 Accounts of the siege of Malta may have temporarily drawn some attention away from the Hungarian war theater, but they also stressed a common notion of Christian defense. The Ottoman invasion of Hungary in 1566 brought French readers’ focus back to Hungary as the bulwark against Turkish domination.

Süleyman’s field army advanced and besieged the fortified town of Szigetvár, which became the focal point of the fighting in Hungary in 1566.83 A pamphlet entitled, Advis de Vienne en Austriche, et de Hongrie…, presented an account of the fighting in Hungary, allegedly related by an eyewitness. The pamphlet author claims that “one of my friends has written me, that as for Hungary, that the Imperial army there is growing day by day, and that it will soon consist of 90,000 infantry, not counting the cavalry.” The pamphlet develops as a series of reports from the Imperial army in Hungary, which included troops sent by the Duke of Savoy, Duke of Ferrara, Granduke of Tuscany, and other allies of the Emperor, as well as the duc de Guise.84

French accounts of the 1566 campaign in Hungary presented the duc de Guise as a heroic crusader. A contemporary pamphlet recounted the duc de Guise’s travels to Vienna and his preparations to join the imperial army, concluding: “my lord and his troop are almost all mounted and armed, hoping to depart for the encampment in five or six days.”85 Brantôme later recorded that “this young valorous prince thus went [to the Hungarian front], well accompanied by many nobles … who could well have numbered a hundred, all valorous.”86 Curiously, some later pro-crusading texts minimized Guise’s participation in the 1566 campaign. For example, Martin Fumée’s late sixteenth-century history of the wars in Hungary merely recorded the French contingent alongside other “nations” that joined the Imperial army.87 Perhaps this source’s reticence to celebrate Guise’s warrior experience stemmed from its publication during the Catholic League wars of the 1590s, which were fueled by deep divisions between Catholic extremists, Catholic moderates, and Huguenots.88

At the time of the 1566 campaign, the duc de Guise’s voyage to the battlefields of Hungary allowed him to establish his crusading credentials and gain vital military experience. Agrippa d’Aubigné mentions the French contingent that joined the imperial army, noting several nobles in the duc de Guise’s entourage, including Philippe Strozzi, Guy de Saint-Gelais de Lansac, and Timoléon de Cossé-Brissac.89 Brantôme later described the French nobles who “went to Hungary with this valiant prince the duc de Guise, who was not yet 18 years old, who—following the example of his ancestors in holy war—wanted to confront the infidel army of the great sultan Süleyman, who was there himself in person.”90 Sahin-Tóth presents the duc de Guise’s participation in crusading war as linked with a specifically Lorraine crusading culture.91 However, the duc de Guise also seems to have helped popularize Hungary as one of the war zones—along with Malta and the Netherlands—associated with military education for young French noblemen. Hungary thus became an appropriate stop on a grand tour for French nobles seeking military adventure and a proper education.92

The Ottomans seemed poised to advance on Vienna after Szigetvár capitulated in early September 1566, but Ottoman forces abruptly abandoned their campaign and withdrew. Süleyman the Lawgiver had actually died at the encampment at Szigetvár, but his senior officers apparently managed to keep his death a secret for several months. Ottoman withdrawal signaled an early end of the campaigning season, which seems to have frustrated many French nobles who were preparing to travel to Hungary to join the fight against the Turks. Brantôme recalled that “I wanted to go off to the war in Hungary; but, in Venice, we heard of the death of the great Sultan Süleyman.”93 Many French nobles were apparently disappointed by the abrupt end of the crusading war in Hungary.

Nonetheless, French reading audiences had become increasingly interested in Eastern Europe following the 1566 campaign. French interest in the Hungarian theater of war is shown by the production of maps of Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, as well as maps specifically on Hungary, such as Gérard de Jode’s Hungariae typus (1567).94 Despite the sustained transnational interest in the ongoing struggle against the Ottomans, news from the Mediterranean threatened to eclipse the Hungarian military frontier.

The great Christian victory at Lepanto in 1571 immediately became a monumental event in crusading culture, celebrated in pamphlets, books, poems, and paintings.95 Because King Charles IX did not officially join the great Holy League against the Ottomans in 1571, studies of Lepanto have often overlooked the significance of the battle for French crusading culture.96 However, many French nobles participated directly in the battle of Lepanto, serving in the Maltese galleys or fighting as volunteers in the Christian fleet. Couriers brought the first news of the victory, which apparently prompted spontaneous celebrations in many French cities. According to one pamphlet, “even in this city of Lyon you will have heard the great bells that give full and certain testimony (with the hymns and canticles that were sung to the God of armies in great devotion and joy) for such a victory.”97 News of the battle of Lepanto circulated widely in France through letters, celebrations, poems, pamphlets, and other publications.98 One pamphlet emphasized Christian unity in crusading combat against the Ottomans: “God wishes to crown entirely the Christians’ victory to punish the insolence and tyranny of the Barbarians.”99

The election of Henri de Valois, duc d’Anjou, as King of Poland in 1573 heightened French audience’s engagement with Eastern Europe in general.100 Henri’s reign as king of Poland was short, since Charles IX’s death in 1574 made him heir to the French throne and brought his return to France. Nonetheless, the French fascination with Polish culture remained, most famously evoked by Henri III’s extravagant fashion and earrings.101 Such styles supported the development of broader stereotypes about Hungarians and other Eastern European peoples in literary and non-literary texts.102 Brantôme told a curious tale of a Spanish officer who had fought in Hungary and who was “exhausted for arms.” The officer regretted having gone to Hungary, “having found in this country no courtesy, the people there being barbarous and rude.”103

French crusading projects became increasingly elaborate toward the end of the sixteenth century. The Calvinist noble François de La Nouë boasted that “if the Christian princes were firmly united, they could chase the Turks from Europe in four years.”104 Alphonse Dupront regards La Nouë as a “solitary crusader,” emphasizing his isolation and inability to realize such a sweeping vision of unified crusade. Dupront further suggests that the “crusading myth” was becoming secular during La Nouë’s lifetime, yet many other French nobles were also engaged in formulating crusading projects.105 Louis de Gonzague, duc de Nevers, developed various planning documents for crusading campaigns in the Mediterranean and Hungary.106 Despite this continued interest in grandiose crusading, warfare in Hungary gradually evolved into a protracted form of seasonal raids along the military frontiers in the 1580s.107 French nobles would have to wait almost a decade for another opportunity to develop their crusading projects in Hungary.

The Habsburg–Ottoman War, 1593–1606

Soon after a new Habsburg–Ottoman war broke out in Hungary in 1593, Nicolas Brulart de Sillery wrote that “I am horrified to hear what is written and published in various places” about the Catholic Leaguers, who refused to accept Henri de Bourbon’s conversion to Catholicism and who were vigorously opposing his accession to the French throne as Henri IV. Brulart believed that the Leaguers were ignoring “the danger of the Turk,” warning of the threat posed by Ottoman armies in Hungary. Brulart argued that: “it seems that God is inviting Christians to reunite and join together though the great success that He has given to the forces of the Emperor in Hungary.”108 Brulart went on to relate the latest news from the theater of war in Hungary and Transylvania, optimistically hoping that Pope would support the Holy Roman Emperor and launch a “ general and offensive war” in Hungary.109

Many French people indeed hoped for peace in France after years of brutal religious conflict within the kingdom, yet Nicolas Brulart de Sillery was not the only French observer to draw connections to Hungary. Guillaume Ancel, French ambassador at Prague, emphasized “the necessity for a peace in France, which cannot happen without the reception of the king.”110 The urgent need for peace within France, for this writer, was clearly coupled to the common Ottoman threat against all Christians: “nothing is more certain than that the continuation of our wars will serve to aid the progress of the enemies of Christianity to penetrate into the entrails of Germany.”111 Despite such hopes for peace, the religious wars would continue to rage in France, but French nobles increasingly became involved in crusading warfare in Croatia and Hungary in the 1590s.

The Habsburg–Ottoman War (1593–1606), also known as the Long Turkish War, produced sustained raiding and siege warfare, attracting crusading contingents from France and elsewhere. Géza Pálffy argues that “the Long Turkish War … was the first modern war in Hungarian history,” characterized by foreign troops, confessional conflict, and civil warfare.112 Péter Sahin-Tóth demonstrates that numerous French and Francophone nobles participated in crusading warfare in Hungary during the Long War. His detailed research in French and Austrian archives reveals a variety of motivations that led French, Wallon, and Loraine nobles to engage in crusading warfare alongside Imperial forces that were fighting against the Ottomans.113

By the time the Long Turkish War broke out, French news publishing had developed significantly, with a number of presses specializing in producing pamphlets relating war news. A number of French-language pamphlets narrated military campaigns, battles, and sieges in Hungary throughout the war. The tributary states of Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia rebelled against Ottoman indirect rule in 1594, joining the crusading cause. French readers could follow the 1595 campaign through Jean de Malmidy’s Discours veritable de la grand’ guerre, qui est au païs de Hongrie, which described the Imperial forces’ capture of Esztergom.114 French authors were writing now histories, chronicles, and other works specifically focused on the wars in Hungary.

Martin Fumée’s Histoire generalle des troubles de Hongrie et Transilvanie (first published in 1595) provided a geographic description of Hungary in addition to a narrative history of the sixteenth-century wars in Hungary. Fumée pointedly dedicates his history “to you (the French people) and to no other.” After describing the brutality of warfare in Hungary, Fumée invites French readers to reflect upon the destructiveness of war. “When you see the ruins and great desolations of a beautiful and rich country, you see your own at present reduce to an identical state.”115 Fumée draws direct comparisons between the miseries of Hungary and France, which were both suffering from divine punishment. He concludes: “it seems that we are in a worse condition than Hungary is in.”116 Hungary then served as a reminder to French people of the shared miseries of religious disunity, political chaos, and civil warfare that continued to plague both kingdoms.

A series of French language pamphlets and narratives related the ongoing fighting in Hungary in the late 1590s. Another imperial army took Eger in 1596, but attrition led to less intense fighting in 1597.117 An account of the ongoing war in Hungary related the sieges of Győr/Raab, Tata/Tottis, and Temesvár (Timişoara, Romania), as well as the broader military campaigns and skirmishes.118 When Imperial armies launched a major new offensive to retake Buda, a number of French pamphlets reported on the action.119 A pamphlet entitled, L’admirable et heureuse prinse de la ville de Bude en Hongrie par l’armee Imperialle, sur les Turcs, offered a series of reports from the war zone in Hungary in the form of several short letters from an anonymous correspondent who was accompanying the Imperial army.120 The siege of Raab provided the subject for another pamphlet published the same year. The author of this pamphlet highlights military technology at the siege, focusing on the use of a pétard, an explosive device often used against city gates.121 The imperial siege of Buda in 1598 again failed to retake the city, however.

As informal French involvement in crusading war increased, so did tensions with the Ottoman Empire—especially concerning the status of French subjects under Ottoman rule. During the 1598 campaign, the French ambassador in Istanbul reported that Sultan Mehmet III was attempting to prevent forced conversions of French subjects within his empire.122 When Christian troops destroyed an Ottoman force near Buda in 1599, a French source celebrated: “God always gives an excellent victory to small forces of Christians facing a great multitude of Turks.”123

After the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes in May 1598, many determined Catholic Leaguers departed from the kingdom in disgust rather than accept Henri IV as a legitimate Catholic ruler.124 Some of these ex-Leaguers, or dévots, headed off to Hungary to serve in the crusading army organized by the Habsburgs against the Ottomans.125 Several members of the Guise family joined armies fighting against the Ottomans in Hungary in the early seventeenth century. Philippe-Emmanuel de Lorraine, duc de Mercœur, aimed to fight against the Ottomans and “to spill the last drop of my blood for the maintenance and protection of our religion against this great other sect of infidels that they say are in great number in Hungary.”126

The duc de Mercœur indeed went on crusade in 1600–1601, serving as lieutenant general for the Holy Roman Emperor in Hungary. A number of contemporary French sources portrayed the duc de Mercœur as an ideal crusader.127 Brantôme records that Mercœur “having acquired lots of money during his wars, employed them in the war in Hungary, where he went in person with his beautiful troops, [and] where he fought so well that he was the envy of the Germans, for he surpassed them all in the art of war.”128 An account of the war in Hungary stresses the duc de Mercœur’s courageous response to the Ottoman Grand Vezir: “That he will not hesitate at all to attack the largest number of infidels with less Christians, even if they have sly minds, being confident in God’s aid.”129 Péter Sahin-Tóth constructs a detailed analysis of the duc de Mercœur’s military leadership and crusading activities in Hungary.130

The Ottomans launched a major offensive in Hungary in the summer of 1600, targeting the fortified city of Nagykanizsa (referred to as Canisa by many contemporaries). In September 1600, an Ottoman army besieged Nagykanizsa, which the Ottoman Grand Vezir described in a letter: “we are going to besiege Canisa, the key to the Christian lands, and the principal gate of this unhappy country of Hungary.”131 The duc de Mercœur led a force to relieve the siege, but the Imperial garrison at Nagykanizsa capitulated in October.132 Several Ottoman writers, including Katib Çelebi, wrote celebratory accounts of the Ottoman siege of Nagykanizsa, incorporating fictional and historical elements.133

A major imperial army assembled under the command of Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand in 1601, aiming to retake Nagykanizsa. The imperial army was a multi-ethnic crusading force composed of Austrian, German, Swiss, Hungarian, Savoyard, Tuscan contingents, accompanied by noble volunteers from France and other territories. The army advanced into Hungary and besieged Nagykanizsa in September 1601.

The writings of a French noble who participated in the Nagykanizsa campaign (presumably Marin Malleville) offer valuable insights on the crusading experience in Hungary.134 Malleville accompanied the Tuscan military contingent to Hungary, having been “commanded by the Grand Duke, my master, to head to Nagykanizsa to join lord Don Giovanni his brother.”135 Malleville could thus offer a close narrative of the campaign in Hungary based on his service with the Tuscan troops and the multi-ethnic crusading army. Soon after the siege trenches opened, Marin Malleville wrote to a Tuscan secretary to describe the siege of Nagykanizsa. Malleville claims that he had suggested a surprise attack on Nagykanizsa and that Don Giovanni de’ Medici had proposed this plan to Archduke Ferdinand.136 Nagykanizsa was not surprised, however, and a formal siege soon developed. Simultaneously, another imperial force was besieging the Hungarian city of Székesfehérvár, which was held by a small Ottoman garrison. Székesfehérvár was taken in only ten days, but the trench fighting around Nagykanizsa wore on for three months. Malleville describes the heavy losses in the ranks of the imperial army and expresses his “pain” after hearing that two fellow officers had been captured and “they were enslaved.”137 The Imperial army eventually abandoned the siege in November 1601.

Soon afterward, Malleville wrote to Henri I de Montmorency, duc de Montmorency, to report the news of the siege of Nagykanizsa. Malleville provides a detailed and complex narrative, which begins by recounting that prior to his departure for Hungary he sent two falcons to Guitard de Ratte, bishop of Montpellier, to keep for the duc de Montmorency. Malleville expresses his surprise that he has not still received confirmation of the falcons’ arrival after his return to France following the campaign. 138

Marin Malleville’s account of the Nagykanizsa campaign is full of recriminations. “I could tell the story of the siege of Nagykanizsa,” Malleville wrote, “but we received so little honor there that I do not dare open my mouth to speak to Your Highness.”139 Malleville compares the geography of Hungary and the character of the fighting to the religious wars he had already experienced in France.140 Malleville offers a description of the fortifications of Nagykanizsa, specifying that “the fortress is composed of five bastions.”141 The siege was finally abandoned—a military failure that Malleville blamed on the German soldiers and the Imperial commanders.142

Malleville criticizes the abandonment of the siege and the withdrawal of the crusading army. He describes the “poor order and disorder” among the Imperial and allied troops toward the end of the siege, which resulted in “the loss of four pieces of artillery, which were abandoned.”143 Malleville records a poem or song that he had heard among the Italian troops, which mocked the German officers in the army:

 

Questa la crude anzi fera Canisa

Che fu lassata impreda in man di cani

Con vituperio infama di Hongueri Corbati est Allemani

E sol l’Italia ce remasta occisa.144

Not content merely to report this satirical verse, Malleville comments himself on the Imperial leaders, who allegedly followed the advice of the Archduke’s Jesuit confessor rather than military officers.145 Malleville was not the only contemporary to assess the Nagykanizsa campaign, but his privileged perspective as a military observer offers a fascinating glimpse of the tensions in the crusading army.

There were other reasons for the failure of the crusading campaign to retake Nagykanizsa, however. The famous case of a group of Francophone soldiers at Papa who mutinied against their commanders and became renegades in May 1600 suggests the strains of crusading war during this period.146 A Catholic noble named de Potrincourt, who had led an infantry regiment for the Catholic League, provides another example of the conflicting loyalties in the Hungarian wars. Potrincourt had raised a new regiment to serve in Hungary during the 1600–1601 campaigns, but allegedly became a renegade serving in Ottoman forces. Brantôme claims that “he revolted and became a renegade … taking with him many brave men of his.”147 Potrincourt apparently remained a renegade, and “he died serving as the pasha of Damascus with a strong reputation and greatly appreciated by his master.”148

The demobilization of the imperial army following the failed Nagykanizsa campaign discouraged some of crusading nobles. Marin Malleville returned to France and Giovanni de’ Medici decided to seek other opportunities for military command at various princely courts. Charles de Gonzague, duc de Nevers, nonetheless led a new group of French nobles on crusade in Hungary in 1602.149 These French nobles joined the Imperial army in the summer of 1602 for another attempt to retake Buda, which also failed.150 Blaise de Montluc-Montesquieu, seigneur de Pompignan, died of disease while serving in the entourage of the duc de Nevers.151 In the aftermath of the 1602 campaign, many more crusading nobles departed.

During the latter stages of the Long War, Hungary descended into an even more chaotic civil war. Lutheran towns resisted Catholic bishops’ efforts at recatholization in Hungary, especially after Habsburg troops occupied a Lutheran church in Kassa (Košice, Slovakia) in January 1604.152 Later in the year, a Calvinist Hungarian noble named István Bocskai led a major uprising against Habsburg rule, but failed to gain widespread support of the Lutheran Hungarians. According to Géza Pálffy, Bocskai instead “became the carefully manipulated vassal of the Ottomans, a ‘Turkish king of Hungary.’”153 Negotiations finally led to an Ottoman–Habsburg peace in 1606, which granted Bocskai the title of Prince of Transylvania, although he died later that year. The Transylvanian diet promptly elected another Calvinist noble, Zsigmond Rákóczi, as its new prince in early 1607.154

Many of the crusading nobles who had fought in the Long Turkish War seem to have been disillusioned by the experience. French Catholics were presumably shocked by the news of a peace sanctioning of a Calvinist prince of Transylvania, but most of them were probably back in France by the time the peace was signed. Indeed, many foreign nobles and soldiers had departed well before the end of the war. Don Giovanni de’ Medici, who had commanded Tuscan troops in Hungary in 1601–1602, traveled to Flanders and then to France, where he offered his services to King Henri IV.155 During his travels, Don Giovanni expressed his continued interest in the war in Hungary by thanking a Florentine official for a delivery of avvisi, manuscript news circulars: “the avvisi that you have send me and that your continually send, are always appreciated.” Don Giovanni noted, however, that “the avvisi from Germany and Hungary arrive here [in Sedan] much earlier by other means.”156 These news connections are perhaps an indication of the close personal and news networks that had been forged among the nobles who had waged crusading warfare in Hungary during the Long War.

Conclusion

By the early seventeenth century, Hungary had become a vital space of crusading experience, which held intimate meaning for many French nobles. Genealogies composed for French nobles in the first decades of the seventeenth century often celebrated family members’ military service in Hungary. A manuscript livre de raison of the seigneur de Châtillon recorded that one of his family members “had been killed in Hungary in 1605 toward the end of December.”157 Other nobles carefully conserved their letters and commissions related to their crusading experiences to use as proofs for their induction into the Order of the Holy Spirit.158 These sources show that lived experiences of crusading in Hungary were deeply meaningful to many French nobles and their families. This article has approached such sources and the wider problem of crusading warfare from a new angle, revealing shifting understandings of French military service on Hungarian battlegrounds. French writings about the battle of Mohács, the 1566 campaign, and the Habsburg-Ottoman War demonstrate that French crusading culture did not operate exclusively through mythic and nostalgic modes of expression, but instead encompassed diverse narratives and associations.

Hungary had become an important case in French political theories and treatises, offering an important lesson on monarchy. Jean Bodin portrays Hungary as suffering under Ottoman domination even before the disaster at Mohács, stressing the pernicious effect of tributary payments and internal violence.159 Martin Fumée emphasized that “this kingdom of Hungary, once rich and powerful, [has] at present fallen into such poverty that it is truly desolated”—warning that France was threatened with the same fate if it did not re-establish religious unity and good government.160 French nobles and political writers continued to dream of Christian unity through crusading. The duc de Nevers wrote: “I beg you to consider that the growth of the Muslim empire came about only because of the divisions among the Christian princes, who fight among themselves, while the Great Turk usurped Christian cities and provinces.”161 Crusading was thus usually contemplated in conjunction with commentaries on the religious divisions within Christianity.

By the early seventeenth century, the enslavement of Hungarians became increasingly important in crusading culture. Guyon considered the treatment of slaves by Christians, Muslims, and Jews, claiming that none of them actually freed slaves who converted to the dominant religion. Muslims did not free Christian slaves, he claims, “which is the reason that the Hungarians, Transylvanians, Polish, Bohemians, Germans, Italians, Danish, and other people no longer free their slaves when they convert.” He contrasts France with these other realms, emphasizing that: “France holds this privilege that any slave who sets foot there is emancipated, as shown by an ancient arrêt of the court of [the parlement de Paris] which found against an ambassador.”162 French authors now contemplated Hungary and Southeastern Europe in the context of commentaries on Mediterranean slavery and the problem of “redemption.”163 Perhaps such discussions reflected a growing interest in empire, as the French colony of Québec was founded in 1608 and New France soon began to provide outlets for crusading conquests and missionary activities.164

Crusading culture continued to be influential in early seventeenth century France. Jean Héroard, royal physician for the dauphin Louis [the future Louis XIII], recorded that Louis boasted that “one day, I will lead a great army into Hungary against the Turk.”165 Religious leaders who were affiliated with the royal family, such as Père Joseph, actively preached on the virtues of crusading.166 As an adult, Louis XIII would continue to promote crusading culture through the Order of the Holy Spirit.167 French nobles in the Knights of Malta proposed elaborate crusading projects to Louis XIII in the 1610s, while other French nobles engaged in their own personal crusades.168 A new French translation of Torquato Tasso’s great crusading tale, Jerusalem Delivered, was published in 1610 with a dedication to the duchesse de Guise, who presumably sponsored the translation.169 Charles de Gonzague, duc de Nevers, developed detailed plans to create a Milice chrétienne and launch a new Catholic crusade to the Holy Land, with support from Maria de’ Medici.170

Nonetheless, French writers often expressed regret that the religious strife and civil warfare within France prevented France from committing more fully to crusading against Muslims. French perceptions of crusading were thus shaped by the ongoing religious conflict within France, since the Edict of Nantes had failed to resolve the religious tensions between the Catholics and the Huguenots in France. New localized conflicts broke out in the confessionally mixed regions of southern France during the 1600s and 1610s. Jacques-Auguste de Thou lamented: “How many years lost in civil wars? If [the Christian princes] had instead employed them against the common enemy of Christianity, [the Turks] would have easily been chased out of Hungary and Africa: which would have added to their glory and their worth.”171 The continuing religious conflicts in France escalated in the 1620s, allowing Louis XIII and many Catholic nobles to enact their crusading desires against Huguenot “rebels” in southern France.172

Hungary remained a crucial theater of crusading warfare, but depictions of the war torn kingdom seem to have been changing by the 1620s. Deepening Franco-Spanish rivalries and the Thirty Years War (1618–48) may have led to Hungary’s displacement in French crusading culture and imaginaries of warfare.173 An altered vision of Hungary would later reemerge in a French political culture during Louis XIV’s reign, but by this time perhaps crusading warfare had truly been replaced by crusading nostalgia.

 

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Sahin-Tóth, Péter. “Expier sa faute en Hongrie. Réminiscences de croisade et pacification politique sous Henri IV.” In Foi, fidelité, amitié en Europe à la période moderne: mélanges offerts à Robert Sauzet, 2 vols, edited by Brigitte Maillard, 429–39. Tours: Publications de l’Université de Tours, 1995.

Sahin-Tóth, Péter. La France et les Français face à la ‘longue guerre’ de Hongrie (1591–1606). PhD diss., Université de Tours, 1997.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage, 1978.

Sandberg, Brian. “‘To Have the Pleasure of This Siege’: Envisioning Siege Warfare during the European Wars of Religion.” In Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, edited by Erin Felicia Labbie and Allie Terry-Fritch, 143–62. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012.

Sandberg, Brian. Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

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Zoltán Péter Bagi

The Life of Soldiers during the Long Turkish War (1593–1606)

 

This study is concerned with the everyday lives, survival strategies, and social composition of the German armed forces who served in the border fortresses and field units of the Imperial and Royal Army during the wars against the Ottoman Empire that were fought on the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This study shows that these troops enlisted to escape poverty and starvation, sometimes serving without weapons, and that their families often followed them onto Hungarian battlefields. As the rich source materials analyzed here demonstrate, however, their new positions confronted them with even greater challenges than they had faced previously, including the day-to-day threat of mortality, epidemics, the vicissitudes of the weather, and the constant deprivations caused by idle mercenaries. They strove to support themselves through fraud and deceit, as well as by forcefully plundering their surroundings; nonetheless, volunteering for military service did not provide them with a permanent solution to the problem of earning a living.

Keywords: Long Turkish War, German-speaking military in the Kingdom of Hungary, survival strategies, subsistence

Introduction

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a significant number of German-speaking soldiers served on the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary, some of them in the strategically important strongholds of the Hungarian border-fortress system that had been created along the Hungarian–Ottoman frontier starting in the late 1520s.1

Hungarian historians have recently discussed the military’s coexistence with civil society, primarily townsfolk and the nobility, and in the cases of Győr, Kassa (Kosice, Slovakia), Keszthely, and Murány (Muráň, Slovakia), such research has shed light on both the advantages and the disadvantages of this forcible cohabitation. In general, it is clear that military objectives far outweighed the interests of locals, whose freedoms and economic activity were restricted in numerous regions. For instance, the army sometimes established connections with local handicraft industries, thereby creating competition for local guilds. And at the same time, while the presence of the military created markets, foreign infantrymen in Kassa, for example, also developed relationships with the families of German citizens there.2 Another significant portion of the mercenaries from the Holy Roman Empire arrived in Hungary during one or another of the military campaigns of the sixteenth century: 1527, 1540, 1551–52, 1566. At the end of military operations, these hired forces tended to scatter and leave the country. However, when the continuous conflict between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire escalated into all-out war again in 1593, it created a new situation. At the conclusion of certain military operations, a significant portion of these field troops did not disband, but rather found winter accommodations and remained in the Kingdom of Hungary. However, until recently, we have had little information about such soldiers. International historical scholarship, though, has long dealt with important issues like the social composition of the armed forces, everyday life in military camps, conflicts between soldiers and citizens, and the role of women in the military.3

With respect to the social composition of the armed forces and the everyday lives of soldiers, the Thirty Years’ War stands at the forefront of both traditional and more recent German historiography. From the second half of the twentieth century onward, military, social, cultural, legal, and technological historians have examined the development and position of the army in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, exploring its everyday life as if the military were its own society, or an anthropologist’s small community.4 On the basis of such research, they have offered up finely shaded portraits of the social composition of the armed forces—that is, of the economic, demographic, social, and climatic factors and changes which led a significant portion of the population to see military service as a fundamental means of survival. In addition to archival sources, German historians have recently turned toward soldiers’ diaries and memoirs, which are especially useful for historical examinations of the way war was experienced and remembered in the period. From the Long Turkish War, however, we know of only one short soldier’s diary.5 Thus in the course of my research, I have gathered together official documents issued by military leaders and also relied on the sporadic data to be found in the works of contemporary historians. On the basis of these materials, I have sought answers to questions like the following: Why—or better yet, instead of what—did these soldiers undertake such dangerous service? What sort of martial virtues did they embody? How did they support themselves and their families? And what were their lives like in the camps?

Beckoned by the Enlistment Drum

Prior to the present study, there has been no comprehensive research on this subject. Only Antonio Liepold’s 1998 monograph has dealt with the role played by the gentry of the Holy Roman Empire and the Austrian Hereditary Lands in the wars against the Ottomans in the sixteenth century.6 German historiography and my own research would suggest that, generally speaking, all social strata—from vagabonds to aristocrats—were represented among the ranks of the cavalry and infantry that served in the Hungarian theater of operations during the Long Turkish War. In the case of the mounted soldiers, medieval military traditions continued to be observed. According to Lazarus von Schwendi’s Cavalry Appointments (Reiterbestallung), the decrees of the Imperial Diet of 1570 in Speyer included a directive that only noblemen were to enlist in the cavalry.7 It was also common for hired horsemen to be selected from among the vassals of the recruiting colonel (Obrist).8

In addition to the recruiting “enterprisers” (Militärunternehmer) and captains (Hauptmänner), there were also large numbers of Southern German noblemen (from Bavaria, Tyrol, Württemberg, and Swabia), as well as wealthy urban patrician youths in the infantry. Their roles were not limited to offices on the staffs of colonels or in the prima plana that directed these units (Fahne); they also enlisted as Doppelsöldner, mercenaries who volunteered for frontline duty in exchange for double pay. A good example is the Doppelsöldner registry for Karl Ludwig Graf zu Sulz’s infantry regiment, dated July 16, 1602. According to this document, those equipped with a round shield (Rundschier) included even persons of baronial descent, like Ulrich and Hans Leonhard Freiherr zu Spauer.9 One year later, Georg Leschenbrandt reported that large numbers of men from the nobility and gentry (Herren- und Rittenstand) of Lower Austria had shown up to enlist in Georg Andreas von Hofkirchen’s infantry unit.10 In hopes of opportunities for advancement, many captains became Doppelsöldner during the reorganization and merging of regiments, as Emperor Rudolf II’s letter to Archduke Matthias mentions in relation to Hans Prenier zu Stöbing’s regiment.11 The majority of these men had originally held the rank of private first class (Gefreite), often given to soldiers of noble blood, either in the ’colonel’s unit or his deputy’s.12

What led these noblemen to enter the service of a military enterprisers? Like advantageous marriages, enlistment in the military had become an important means of improving one’s lot. The pay and the spoils of war could make it financially profitable, and it also served as a strategy for social advancement. And beyond these possible gains in income and prestige, the desire for adventure also played a part in the decisions of the counts, lords, and youthful members of the urban elite who signed up. In addition, the revival of the idea of a crusade against the Ottoman Empire was also a motivating factor for members of the nobility and the urban elite.13 Most of the noblemen who fought in the infantry were prevented by their poor financial situations from serving in mounted units.14

However, the vast majority who enlisted were ordinary men from villages and cities. In keeping with a medieval practice called Gleve, aristocratic horsemen maintained entourages (lange Reihe) of six to twelve persons who escorted them into battle.15 The main body of the infantry was also recruited from among the commoners. In the case of noblemen, financial necessity tended to mix with the desire for personal glory; commoners’ main reason for showing up to enlist was to make a living. The population explosion in sixteenth-century Europe created a surplus of labor and a price surge, which, together with the so-called little ice age and the resultingly poor crop production, had a severe effect on living conditions.16 The hope of monthly payment and the loot enterprisers promised attracted the impoverished, who were struggling to supply themselves and their families with more and more expensive food on smaller and smaller wages.17 These included the suburban poor (guild apprentices, day laborers, domestic servants),18 craftsmen in under-remunerated professions (bakers, weavers, fabric dyers, tailors),19 and agricultural workers who had lost their means of subsistence to population growth and the resulting fragmentation of property (peasants, servants, day laborers, and farmhands).20 Wandering beggars, drifters, criminals, clergymen, and students also enlisted in the military,21 and even women gave soldiering a try.22 Thus, the hierarchy within the army faithfully imitated the established structure of society. This is why Brage Bei der Wieden referred to the sixteenth-century German army as a “parallel society” (Nebengesellschaft).23

The 1570 edicts (Artikelbrief) decreed that pikemen and gunmen had to own both proper armaments and uniforms in order to be mustered.24 However, penniless recruits from the fringes of society possessed neither.25 Even in the second half of sixteenth century, military enterprisers had to buy weapons in bulk, thus enabling anyone to enlist for mercenary service. By the time of the Long Turkish War, this state of affairs had become permanent, as the following two accounts demonstrate. On June 1, 1595, the monarch ordered his comptroller’’s office (Buchhalterei) to send the financial accounts for Oberhauptmann Hans Geizkofler’s three units to Michael Zeller, the military cashier in Hungary. According to this document, equipping the 900-man unit required 5410 Gulden, 9 Kreutzer, and 2 Pfennig, while the soldiers’’ monthly wages amounted to 8565 Gulden.26 An account from January of 1601 is even more telling about the armament needs of the entire force. According to it, there were only 1430 handheld firearms in the Vienna armory at that time, while another 19,990 were to be obtained before the next campaign.27 The Cavalry Appointments directory regulated weaponry and uniforms for mounted soldiers. Enlisted noblemen were instructed to provide their entourages with proper apparel that would protect both the soldiers and their equipment from the elements. In addition, every sixth retainer was to be armed with a fine musket.28 Impoverished soldiers, recruited from the periphery of society, tended to arrive for enlistment without any weapons.29

The actual military value of Western mercenaries is subject to question; Géza Perjés considered them to be the scum of society.30 Whether evaluating their performance in the infantry or the cavalry, it is hard to give a precise answer. It is arguable that horsemen from high-born families would have had the requisite knowledge of techniques for fighting from the saddle. The documents show, however, that this was not always true of their entourages. On July 19, 1598, Johann Eustach von Westernach, in describing the enlistment of Georg Friedrich von Hohenlohe’s black riders, reported that counts and noblemen recruited many young boys and demanded that they receive the same payment as experienced soldiers.31 Apparently, this problem was a persistent one: Hermann Cristoph von Russworm, sent to investigate the rebellion of 600 Dutch mounted gunmen, advised Archduke Matthias that Philipp Graf zu Solms’ soldiers should be retained with monthly payments and renewals (reductio) because they were tried and tested soldiers who knew the enemy well, and were thus of more use to the emperor than an inexperienced band of recruits.32

The case was the same with the infantry: there are examples both of mercenaries’’ merit and of their incompetence as well. An undated and anonymous fragment, annotated by Gundaker von Liechtenstein, asserted that hired forces should be well-versed in wielding their weapons, which experience was at least partly dependent on their financial status.33 Our sources from the Long War suggest a wide variety of experience levels among the troops. In June of 1598, Westernach and Zacharias Geizkofler, in describing the muster of Johann Friedrich von Mörsburg’’s regiment, reported that among the Doppelsöldner, those wielding “short arms” and two-handed swords had been fighting in wars for periods ranging from 10 to 30 years, and that even the least experienced among them had served for 5 or 6 years—in Italy, Brabant, the Netherlands, France, Burgundy, or Hungary. The two commissioners lavished praise on the regiment’’s musketeers as well. Their report says that of a thousand such soldiers, there were perhaps 25 or fewer who had no previous combat experience. They reported that quite a few of the gunmen had served on French, Dutch, Piemontese, or Hungarian battlefields, and that the others were strong, if fairly old. The latter remark was not a random addition by Geizkofler and Westernach. The document also states that the military enterprisers had not found enough arquebusiers, and that there were too few musketeers to reassign any of them to the arquebusiers. Thus the two muster officers were forced to register many inexperienced youths.34 This is a single but not isolated example which clearly illustrates the range of experience in the infantry brigades of the Imperial and Royal Army. All in all, some of the soldiers, especially the Doppelsöldner and musketeers, were considered skilled warriors. Some weeks later, after inspecting Ludwig Graf zu Sulz’’s infantry regiment, Westernach reported that most of the enlisted were strong, healthy, battle-tested soldiers who could be truly useful to the emperor.35 In addition, there are many references suggesting that a large portion of the soldiers who were dismissed enlisted again in newly formed regiments, and that many commissioned muster inspectors had favorable opinions of these soldiers as well.36 In contrast, elements of the Bestallungen and professional reports indicate that there were rookies who had joined the ranks of the arquebusiers and were unskilled in the use of their weapons.37 In my opinion, however, this was not a significant problem. It was natural that inexperienced recruits from the fringes of society would begin their service among the arquebusiers. On the one hand, they could afford only the cheapest weapons, and on the other, much more practice would have been required to learn the weaponry techniques and battlefield formations of the Doppelsöldner. Unlike polearm-wielding soldiers, gunmen could learn the basic skills for handling their weapons in just a couple of days, and they could move more freely on the battlefield, even in the more closed tertios, or pike-and-shot formations. Their lack of experience did not necessarily put them at a tactical disadvantage either, as volley firing could do great damage to their Ottoman opponents.38 The only problem arose when an arquebusier, in hopes of greater payment, decided to enlist the following year as a musketeer or Doppelsöldner without having mastered the given weapon. According to Geizkofler’s 1603 report, this was common in the Imperial and Royal Army. It must also be noted that such efforts to earn promotions and the consequent higher wages were standard career strategies not limited to the arquebusiers.39

Based on the above observations, I would argue that neither opinion at either extreme is correct: I do not think that a completely unprepared mass of soldiers from the Holy Roman Empire was assigned to the Hungarian theater of operations. But it would also be a mistake to assume that a fully professional, well-trained infantry and cavalry entered the fray against the Ottoman army during this fifteen-year war. In reality, there are examples that illustrate both cases: we find unqualified greenhorns alongside mercenaries who had fought in numerous campaigns and knew their weapons well.

Regular Wages as the Basis of Subsistence?

Even though more volunteers usually showed up at musters than could be enrolled, and even though several units enlisted more recruits than the Bestallung called for,40 the total sum designated for payouts to mercenaries increased steadily over the course of the Long Turkish War. This phenomenon is apparently the result of three closely interrelated factors. The negotiated payments were dependent on (1) food prices, which were increasing due to the aforementioned little ice age, (2) the lobbying efforts of war contractors, and (3) the interests of recruited mercenaries.41 Sources describing the frequency and the amounts of the payments mercenaries actually received are fairly limited, thus we can only conjecture based on the written records to which we have access. In my opinion, however, it is logical to look at the various kinds of payments made to mercenaries, from their enlistment and muster until their disbandment.

The first sum of money to which an enlisted soldier was theoretically entitled was the Anritt- or Laufgeld, an advance payment that enabled an enrolled soldier to travel from the location of his recruitment to the site of his unit’’s muster inspection. Soldiers from distant provinces who enlisted in newly formed units were likely to receive this money. However, it was not always enough to cover all their expenses, as the distance between the towns where they were recruited and ultimately inspected could be several hundred kilometers; sometimes prospective soldiers simply spent this money on drinks at nearby taverns.42 In some cases, the recruit might get an advance on his first monthly payment, which was recorded on the muster registry. Troops who had already served on Hungarian battlefields could expect to receive this sort of advance again if they continued their service. In December 1597, for instance, Zacharias Geizkofler and Bartholomäus Pezzen negotiated with Seifried von Kollonich and Heinrich Matthias von Thurn, convincing them to remain in their regiment for an Anrittgeld of 4 Gulden and a monthly wage of 12 Gulden. However, these negotiations ultimately failed, and thus these advances were never disbursed.43

Soldiers did not always receive the per diem promised to those who were awaiting inspection. Payments to Tettau’s horsemen, for instance, began on the 10th day of the month, not on the date of their muster. In his July 16, 1598 report, the commissioned inspection officer explained this seeming bonus payment by noting that the horsemen had never received the Nachtgeld they had been promised.44 In most cases, however, the problem was not a failure to distribute the assigned sums, but rather that the amounts were too meager to keep up with ever-increasing food prices, which made it difficult for soldiers to provide for themselves, their relatives, or their horses.

Like the advances, the first monthly payments following a muster also seem to have been uncertain. In their report on the 1598 muster of the Mörsburg regiment, Westernach and Geizkofler noted that the soldiers were dissatisfied with their negotiated payments. Among other grievances, they complained that they had hardly received any of the money for their third month of service, and that their first month’’s payments had gone almost entirely toward their weapons expenses. In their opinion, the prices for the gear prescribed by the Capitulatio for Doppelsöldner, musketeers, and arquebusiers (11, 9, and 6 Gulden, respectively) were too high; they were also concerned that they would not receive the remaining two months’’ payment in full.45

In the period between the first month’s payment and the next muster, military enterprisers often received only an advance for the following months, out of which they had to distribute their underlings’’ wages. On November 2, 1604, Giorgio Basta summoned the colonels (Obristen) of his army and told them that their infantry and cavalry would receive their pay and uniforms only in Kassa. As a token, they handed out 2 Gulden to each soldier. However, the soliders would not receive another payment until January of 1605, and this was not a full month’s wages either, but merely another advance collected from the towns around Eperjes (Prešov, Slovakia). By June 19, 1605, this lack of wages had led to threats of mutiny. The infantrymen of the Puchheim regiment protested in front of the house of the judge in Eperjes, demanding full payment of the five month’s wages that had been denied them. The situation was resolved by the colonel’s deputy, Lazarus von Schwendi, who ordered that money and supplies be handed out to the soldiers.46

However, even these advances were not always paid. Having arrived at a muster of Walloon infantrymen, Geizkofler and Pezzen wrote in their December 3, 1597 report that though the officers had received the assigned funds, they did not disburse them to the sick.47 In January of 1598, commissioned inspector Jakob Püchler reported the following from a Walloon army muster at Érsekújvár: the officers of Alphonso Montecuccoli’s cavalry had requested that their advances not be deducted from their balances because their military enterpriser, though he had received the money, had never paid it to them.48 Russworm, Sulz, and Mörsburg described similar experiences in their 1604 reports.49 To this day, no documents confirming that the soldiers received their siege and battle payments have ever surfaced.

The army cashier sometimes issued extraordinary payments. As prescribed in the Bestallungbrief and in the Artikelbrief, troops who took part in a successful siege or battle were entitled to an extra month’s pay.50 On October 7, 1598, Westernach sent a fairly strange letter to the Emperor from the military camp in Buda. After the capture of Víziváros, the colonels and their troops, who had been hired with imperial funds, demanded their siege bonuses. However, the imperial army commissioner would only disburse this money if the Christian troops were to take the castle itself; otherwise, he argued, the already secured lower castle would be lost again.51 In December of 1601, Archduke Matthias informed the troop commanders who had taken part in the capture of Székesfehérvár and the consequent battle at Sárrét that the Emperor had denied their requests for siege and battle bonuses, along with their pleas to be compensated for the damage done to their regiments.52 The reason behind the Court Military Council’s decision may well have been a chronic lack of money, given that the regiments of those making these demands—Hofkirchen, Adolf von Althan, Preiner, and Hans Wendel von Pernhausen—had participated in both military operations.53

Whether soldiers resigned or continued their service, the commissioned muster officer would negotiate their pay with the military enterpriser who had enlisted them. In the former case, even if their agreements specified the payments to be made to the soldiers (or to their widows and orphans), such stipulations were not always honored. In some cases, not even this final payment—already diminished by deductions for advances and food expenses—would be fully paid in cash. Instead, soldiers were issued bills of credit, the so-called Restzettel, in the amount they were owed,54 which bills could be redeemed at the army cashier’s office.55 In many cases, colonels, other officers, or sometimes even civilians would purchase these bills of credit from the soldiers and demand compensation for them at a later date.56

The situation for soldiers who continued their service was hardly better. As one captain of a reenlisted Walloon infantry unit explained in a letter in February of 1596, the proposed inducement to re-up (a half-month’s pay plus food) was insufficient, especially considering that his soldiers had not received the first month’s pay promised by the Accordo. They thus demanded that they be dismissed and provided with documents of passage that would enable them to return home.57

It is not surprising, therefore, that military enterprisers in the Hungarian theater of operations had to offer their mercenaries “incentives”. On the one hand, mercenaries were motivated by these irregularly issued monthly payments; on the other, as Parker has demonstrated in the case of the Netherlands’ Spanish army,58 continually rising food prices also compelled them to enlist.

Alternative Means of Making a Living

As mercenaries had to provide for themselves and their families, they had to seek other sources of income in addition to—or instead of—their “normal” pay, which came only irregularly, or not at all for months. Petty fraud, the systematic looting of their environment, and family members’ incomes helped them mitigate the severity of their destitution.

Minor Circles of Deception

Even the Artikelbrief accepted at the Imperial Diet of 1570 in Speyer contains several paragraphs addressing soldiers’ various cons, swindles, and schemes. According to this document, the swapping of weapons and gear between mercenaries was prohibited. It also defined the length of the month to be served and the corresponding payment, and also recommended execution for those who deserted or took unauthorized leave after receiving their wages. It also made it a capital offence to enlist as a mercenary under two different captains or in two different places, which some did in hopes of doubling their money. To eliminate this possibility, recruits were supposed to fill out their muster documents with their given and family names, as well as their place of origin. Officers were obliged to ensure that everyone served in the campaign with their own weapons and armor. In addition, enterprisers had to make sure not to enlist anyone from another infantry unit or from the cavalry.59

Apart from the types of fraud referred to in the Artikelbrief, there are other instances of deception in the contemporary sources. An order issued by the Hofrat on April 12, 1600 prohibited enterprisers from enrolling vineyard laborers (Hauer) for military service. Their enlistment was discouraged as they sometimes deceived both the vineyard owners and the recruiting captains. They did not do their work in the wineries, nor did they show up at the musters, stealing and damaging crops as they migrated to and fro.60

It also happened that enterprisers and enlisted men were partners in such schemes, the unit commander secretly dismissing his soldiers and keeping their wages for himself. To keep his ruse from being discovered, the commander would hire day laborers at minimal cost to “stand in for the roll call” and then depart, as related by a patent issued on November 10, 1600.61

Pillaging as a Means of Survival

Plunder and pillage were everyday activities for the enlisted, from their muster and encampment until their disbandment, despite the fact that the Artikelbrief recommended the death penalty for anyone who engaged in such acts.62 Even so, it did little to discourage them. On the one hand, as Zacharias Geizkofler pointed out in his report dated January 11, 1597, the Dutch cavalry was accustomed to pillaging and marauding.63 The next year, Martin Crusius, a Greek professor at Tübingen University, noted in his journal that Georges Bayer de Boppard’s Walloon infantrymen had caused extensive damage at Pfuhl (near Ulm), going so far as to burn down 17 houses.64 On the other hand, the soldiers’ daily payments were insufficient to sustain them. In his May 15, 1598 letter to Rudolf II, Archduke Matthias reported that mercenaries from the Russworm infantry regiment, while waiting for their muster in Lower Austria, received four Kreutzer a day with which to provide for themselves and their families. However, as the author argued, this was so meager—not even enough to buy bread—that the soldiers simply stole whatever they needed to survive from poor local subjects. Thus, the Archduke proposed a doubling of the daily payment for those waiting to be mustered. In addition, he allowed taxes on the locals to be decreased or eliminated altogether.65

The most problematic form of tax increase levied on local subjects was the repeated postponement of the day of muster. According to a detailed note compiled by members of the Lower Austrian nobility in 1602, Hofkirchen’s 3000 infantrymen waited to be mustered at Krems for 36 days. Sulz’s regiment had to wait 42 days at Tull for the muster commissioners. Hans Ernst von Sprinzenstein’s unit had to stay idle for 73 days until their muster. In addition, the mounted arquebusiers hired by the Lower Austrian noblemen were given an extra 20,000 Rheingulden over and above their allotted wages in hopes of stopping their harassment of poor local subjects.66

The prolongation of marches also imposed significant burdens on local populations. According to the aforementioned note, 3000 Walloons spent 14 days on a march over land and water across Lower Austria; the infantry hired by the Upper Austrian nobility spent 10 days; the Salzburg army 16 days; and Philipp Otto Graf zu Salm, Wild- und Rheingraf’s 500 riders took 23 days. On such occasions, local inhabitants had to provide supplies not only for the troops, but for the commissioned inspectors as well, not to mention the constant abuses of power they had to endure.67

The armies that appeared at muster sites for disbandment also caused great damage. As the waiting time for the muster increased, so did the burdens on the local population. Note the following data from the compiler of the previously cited Lower Austrian registry: Kollonich’s 1000 horsemen, while waiting to be disbanded in the area of Marchfeld and Ebzersdorf, parasitized the population for 21 days, while the 2000 Austrian infantrymen at Hainburg did likewise for 21 days. One thousand soldiers from Salzburg did so for 5 days at the Schwadorf estate, while the infantry hired by the Upper Austrian noblemen spent 46 idle days in the vicinity of Fischamand.68 Geizkofler and Pezzen seem justified in suggesting in their December 3, 1597 report that the quickly and competently executed muster, reorganization, and disbandment of the Royal and Imperial troops stationed at Pozsony (Bratislava, Slovakia) saved the subject population approximately a hundred thousand Gulden.69

Those who remained in service were ordered into winter encampments by the Court’s Military Council. As this was enormously expensive, Rudolf II recommended in an October 1601 letter that wages for these months should be decreased, or that two month’s payment should simply be skipped.70

To spare Austria, Walloons were usually quartered in Hungarian territories, where nearby counties, towns, and villages were to provide for them. However, as they were underpaid, soldiers often “acquired” supplies from the vicinity of their accommodations.71 In the records of the patrician conclaves of Sopron, Vas, and Zala counties, there are recurrent entries complaining about instances of Walloon and French extortion in their villages, which led them to petition Archduke Matthias to have these soldiers transferred.72

The German military was quartered in Lower Austria, usually in Vienna, either in the towns and villages along the Hungarian border or in the territory of Habsburg Hungary.73 Their payments for extended service were, again, erratic or missing, which led them to take essentials like food and firewood from local subjects by force. The February 23 entry of the Court Military Council’s 1595 protocol relates that Andreas Medwe was sent to Helckendorf to investigate crimes committed by the mercenaries of Jakob Hannibal von Raitenau’s regiment, including the murder of a peasant.74 Some months later, in December of 1595, Raitenau’s German soldiers were again involved in a series of incidents. Because of the aforementioned huge amount of unpaid wages,75 the remaining army that was housed on the outskirts of Vienna began systematically robbing the population. Their transgressions ceased only when certain key figures were captured and executed on December 20.76

The army that was stationed in Upper Hungary also imposed a great burden on the population of the neighboring counties. This is why the local nobility petitioned the Emperor on April 30, 1603 with a detailed depiction of the soldiers’ plundering of the locals. According to their petition, they had complained several times about the damage done by soldiers of various nationalities, especially mounted gunmen wearing white, green, and blue coats, serving in Szatmár (Satu Mare, Romania). They divided the villages among themselves, confiscating wood, hay, and straw by force and without payment. Village judges and subjects were coerced into trading at prices that were set by the plunderers. Thus, one véka (an obsolete unit of measurement) of oats normally went for for one Gulden, but it also happened that soldiers would demand not one, but two, or even four véka in exchange for this fee. If there was no fodder in the village, the population would be forced to travel to the market in Kassa or elsewhere to purchase the required supplies. And while market prices fluctuated, soldiers would pay for their foodstuffs, wine, and fodder only according to a set list of prices, and thus villagers were sometimes forced to do this shopping at a loss.

In the winter, depending on the conditions, three or four of these mounted gunmen would chose a county and move into a village. Once there, they would demand food of the best available quality, also requisitioning free provisions for their wives or children or companions. First they would be given beer, and when it ran out, they would want the best wine. If there was no wine, they would send the locals away to find some, sometimes to sources miles away. All in all, they indulged themselves, keeping kitchens and cellars open all day and night. This caused the locals to complain, as they did not have so much that they could satisfy their guests, who forced the peasants to do their bidding by beating them or threatening them with weapons. They also looted houses, taking pillows, beds, geese, hens, and swine, and even this was not enough, as they often seized everything that had not been buried. As long as the soldiers were there, they would want a half véka of fodder—nearly equivalent to a Prague bushel—for each horse. And if that was not sufficient, peasants would be sent to the market to buy more.

The author of this document goes on to discuss the coming of spring. Villagers were afraid of further damage, suspecting that, beyond the usual seizures, the soldiers would confiscate lambs, pigs, geese, and other poultry. On top of all this, some of the mounted gunmen, unsatisfied with the aforementioned goods, came with wagons and took the wheat, barley, and oats that the serfs had grown and had it milled for their own use. These soldiers committed such plunder not once or twice or four times, but as often as they fancied. Thus—the noblemen’s complaint asserted—our villages had survived the Tatars (that is, the Ottoman Turks), only to be destroyed by our own mounted soldiers. Not only did the nobles worry that their tax-paying serfs were being plundered and impoverished, they were increasingly disturbed by the mercenaries’ failure to distinguish nobles from commoners. They ravaged estates and occupied empty houses, treating everyone equally.

The local nobility argued in this petition that the soldiers of Johann Baptista Pezzen’s regiment had done the greatest damage. They looted, plundered, and pillaged everywhere, in the courtyards and castles of noblemen, clergymen, and laymen alike. They butchered countless cattle, they abused virgins and women of good reputation, they committed murder and other despicable acts—it is a wonder that the earth did not open up and devour them.77 And thus the Court ordered the Szepes Chamber in Kassa to investigate the complaints of the Upper Hungarian nobility, which also included the assertions that Pezzen’s infantry regiment had taken three or four thousand (!) horses and that the plundered goods of a single captain had filled eight wagons.78

This pillage and plunder was naturally accompanied by violence and destruction, and military leaders struggled against such viciousness, both in their camp regulations and in the Artikelbrief. Thanks to these efforts, certain provisions of the two documents forbade the abuse or dishonoring of women in labor, the pregnant, virgins, the elderly, preachers, priests, and parish clerks. They likewise forbade the looting or destruction of churches, monasteries, hermitages, and schools. For all such transgressions, clauses 8 and 9 of the Artikelbrief held out the possibility of the death penalty.79 In article 53, Schwendi also forbade, under threat of execution, the destruction of crops, mills, and bakers’ ovens, by which provision he hoped to safeguard the army’s food sources. In addition, in article 54, the drafters of this document emphatically stressed that the aged and infirm, clerics, women, and small children—that is, the unarmed and those incapable of bearing arms—should never beaten or killed; anyone who committed such a crime was to pay for it with his life. Schwendi also used the threat of death to ward off another recurrent form of hooliganism—anyone who pilfered or set fire to a military camp without the express command of his colonel was to be executed. 80 Of course, these official prohibitions had little actual effect on everyday practice, as exemplified by the sacking of Beszterce (Bistrita, Romania) in February of 1602. However, neither in its death toll nor in the volume of plundered wealth did this incident measure up to the losses suffered by the rich city of Magdeburg, which was sacked in 1631 by the soldiers of the Catholic League, and where 20-30,000 citizens were slaughtered.81 Thus, the Long Turkish War was marked by pillaging, plundering, and ransacking, just like other European theaters of war. However, the volume of such depredations permanently circumscribed the growth of the cities of the Kingdom of Hungary and Transylvania, so that neither in population nor in economic terms did they ever reach the size or potential of similar cities in Western Europe.

Wives and Children

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the motley crews that accompanied the armed forces were made up primarily of women and children.82 In antiquity, it was not regarded as extraordinary for a mercenary to set off on a military campaign with his wife, or even his entire family. Even into the nineteenth century, their presence was generally described as a common military obligation.83 Based on communications from the Long Turkish War and the Thirty Years’ War, it is possible to come up with a rough estimate of the number of people who stayed in military camps but did not fight. In a patent dated April 28, 1601, Rudolf II informed the magistrates of Grundramsdorf, Neudorf, and Biedermasdorf that Captain Dietmayr Schiffer’s 200-man battalion, then in the service of the Pope, was to be dismissed if it were to come to any of these three villages. According to this document, these soldiers were accompanied by 19 women and children (Trossweib und Bubeln).84 At the end of February, 1632, after a short siege, the defenders of Buxtehude surrendered the stronghold entrusted to them to Swedish troops, who, in exchange, promised the Imperial Guard and their companions a safe withdrawal. A short time later, 501 soldiers, 335 women, and 367 children abandoned the city.85 In all probability, they belonged to a regiment of Albrecht von Wallenstein’s army, then stationed at Forchheim, near Bamberg, at the muster of which the enteprisers listed 2258 soldiers, 916 women, and 521 children.86 Johann Jakob von Wallhausen, on the other hand, in his 1615 work Kriegskunst zu Fuß (Warfare On Foot), reckoned that the recruitment of 3000 soldiers would mean the presence of 4000 women and children (!) in their camp.87 This number does not appear to be an exaggeration, given that in 1573 it was assumed that approximately 5000 various people (footmen, servants, wives, prostitutes, and children) and as many as a thousand horses would accompany a 3000-man Spanish regiment going off to war.88

Enterprisers were generally of the opinion that the wives and children in the camps were merely useless, hungry mouths89 who slowed the army down, contributed to rising food prices, and lowered morale. Accordingly, they renewed their efforts to restrict or even prohibit the hiring of married mercenaries.90 In spite of this, there were many of them in the Christian armies of the Long War and their contemporaries viewed their presence as common, even customary. As Ferenc Dersffy wrote in his August 13, 1597 letter to the lord lieutenant (supremus comes or főispán) of Árva county, György Thurzó of Bethlenfalva: “…with the Germans, as they cannot be without them, there are many women.”91 Four years later, Peter Casal wrote to Graz from the Christian encampment at Kanizsa that in the two regiments hired by Gianangelo Gaudanzi di Madruzzo, Baron d’Avy, he had seen more women than men.92

The women and children traveling with the army were not just useless idlers to be fed; they took part in the everyday life and work of the camp and tried to help their families earn a living. For example, they participated in the construction of siege ramps. Casal, who personally took part in the siege of Kanizsa in 1601, mentions several times in his letters that the women worked alongside the men and that several of them were even shot.93 They also took part in the cleaning of the camp lavatories and in nursing the sick and the wounded.94

In addition to carrying all the family’s belongings, women cared for the children and looked after the animals. They washed officers’ clothes for money, occasionally begged for alms, and sometimes hurried to the battlefield to loot corpses with their husbands.95 To sustain their families, they often risked their lives by looking for food outside the camps. According to Casal’s description, food was so scarce in the camp of the Christian army besieging Kanizsa that in early September of 1601 every able person left the camp armed with huge poles, walking as far as a mile to beat the fruit from the region’s apple and plum trees. In their hunger, many gorged themselves, devouring all the fruit in sight and subsequently falling ill.96

Enterprisers also seem to have taken advantage of the presence of family members in the camps, as it happened more than once that women and children dressed themselves in army garments before a muster and thus deceived the mustering officer. The military enterpriser could then pocket the payments meant for those who were serving only on paper, after honoring these supplementals” with a few coins. Such troublesome experiences can be inferred from the Bestallung issued in Preiner’s name on March 15, 1602. It emphasized that enterprisers were not to enlist young kids (Buben), but men skilled in warfare. In addition, Geizkofler’s report, dated January 18, 1603, in reinforcing the edicts of the 1603 Imperial Diet in Regensburg, suggested that it would be necessary to set up a permanent army because youngsters were enlisting at every recruitment drive, especially among the arquebusiers, and that they were useless and a waste of food.97

Whether in the Long Turkish War or the Thirty Years’ War, if her husband left her or was killed in battle, the situation of a mercenary’s wife could change quickly. If she could not support herself or find a new husband—that is, in many instances—she had no other option than to prostitute herself to survive. After a while, these women came to be regarded just like those who had joined the campaigning army as prostitutes in the first place.98

A Final, Desperate Move: Desertion, Insubordination, or Mutiny

Soldiers’ dissatisfaction was directly proportional to their unpaid wage bills and their hunger. The Christian army that besieged Kanizsa in 1601 included mercenaries from Central and Southern Italy who could not tolerate the Hungarian climate and often deserted the army in groups of twenty or thirty.99 In the spring of 1602, some privates and infantrymen from the Althan regiment, fed up with their unpaid wages, left their winter encampment and deserted to Vienna. The Emperor distributed a patent throughout the city and the entirety of Lower Austria, warning residents to keep their gates closed and to check every passage, ferry, and customs checkpoint if necessary. Upon capture, these deserters’ full names were to be reported and they were to be kept under strict surveillance.100 In that same year, the remaining soldiers of Johann Baptista Pezzen’s regiment left their appointed winter quarters and marched back to Austria.101

One year later, Russworm had to investigate the revolt of 600 Dutch mounted gunmen who had been hired by Solms in Upper Hungary. According to his report, the soldiers’ disaffection and their ransacking of the region had been caused by the failure to pay them, and he recommended that this be kept in mind in sentencing both the leaders and the participants in this mutiny.102

As described in a letter written to Rudolf II in May of 1604, another thousand soldiers, these from the Mörsburg infantry regiment, also revolted over delinquent payments. This group left their appointed winter quarters in the town of Szentgyörgy (Durdevac, Croatia), marched to Lower Austria, and occupied Schwechat. However, when Sulz and Bernhard Leo Gall’s infantry and cavalry arrived to confront them, they disavowed their mutiny and gave up their five chief leaders.103

There is no doubt that the largest mutiny of mercenaries during the Long Turkish War was the revolt at Pápa. By August or September of 1599, the French and Walloon infantry brigades in the military camp at Esztergom were on the verge of open revolt. By disbursing some money, Geizkofler, the Court Military Council, and the Court Chamber managed to resolve the precarious situation, but only temporarily. In June of 1600, the French army, still lingering at their winter quarters in Pápa, revolted over insufficient supplies and overdue wages. It took a proper siege to retake the stronghold from them, and some of them even defected to the Ottoman army.104 Considering all this, it is no surprise that Karl von Liechtenstein’s professional report argued that it was inadvisable to enlist additional French troops, given their unreliability. He also advised against hiring new Walloon mercenaries because their long marches to the battlefield greatly increased their cost, and their casualties could not be easily replaced. It must also be noted that Liechtenstein was of the opinion that the climatic conditions in the Hungarian lands made Italians unfit for imperial service there; he also considered Cossacks marauders rather than soldiers.105

Weather and the Troops

In addition to the constant hardships soldiers faced, like mortal danger and unpaid wages, we have to consider two more influences on their everyday lives: weather and epidemics. The so-called “little ice age” was the period of intensified glaciation between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries. One of its coldest periods took place at the turn of the seventeenth century. By the end of the sixteenth century, the hot, dry summers of the 1550s were turning colder and colder, with more and more precipitation. Alpine glaciers started to grow in the mid-1580s and kept advancing until the turn of the century, and as a result, the average annual temperature dropped by 1.2-1.4 degrees Celsius. Summers became cooler and rainier, while winters became colder and harsher, and this climate change also affected the Carpathian Basin. The cold period that started in the middle of the sixteenth century was at its worst between 1595 and 1602.106

In the 1570 Artikelbrief, Schwendi required both infantry and cavalry to wear good coats or cloaks in order to protect themselves and their firearms from the cold.107 Of course, this directive was not always obeyed. Westernach wrote in his October 7, 1598 report to the Court Military Council that due to the cold, many men were lying sick in their tents and in makeshift huts.108 One month later, muster inspector Kulner reported from the muster of the Preiner regiment that a large part of the infantry had fallen ill as a result of the cold weather and their poor garments.109 In a volume published in 1685, Tobias Kober wrote that bronchitis and the common cold were regular problems in Hungary, especially in the encampments. Most soldiers were affected, and often suffered from the resulting sore throats and pulmonary diseases. Afflicting the whole body, these ailments contributed to the so-called “Pannonian languor” (“languores Pannonicos”). Old soldiers protected themselves with aqua vitae (pálinka, or vino sublimate), often drinking it in the morning. Mörsburg prohibited his infantrymen from consuming spirits, but Kober convinced him that pálinka was indeed useful during cold season. However, the wise doctor also added that its consumption could be harmful in hot weather. Some aqua vitae could drive thickened mucus out of the throat, but it was thought to cause one’s bile to boil when the weather was hot. Thus he advised Mörsburg to consider the suitability of the weather and the season, particularly in the Hungarian encampments. Having served as field medic to the Imperial and Royal Army in 1596 and 1597, Kober thought that the various natural phenomena that scourged the Christian army during the siege of Buda in 1598 were actually the work of Turkish sorcerers and Satan himself.110

Christian and Ottoman sources both mention that the weather during the siege of Kanizsa in the autumn of 1601 was rather cold and wet. This greatly slowed the preparations for the siege, as the almost constant rainfall on the already sodden swamplands made digging siege ramps and filling the moat impossible. For example, their supposedly decisive assault was to start on October 28 because the Imperial and Royal forces had been able to start the digging for the ramps only nine days earlier. Then, a great snowfall rendered the continuation of the siege impossible. The incessant rain, followed by snow and freezing dawns, made the conditions almost unbearable for the starving soldiers. The Southern Italians, who had never known such dire weather, suffered the most. To provide material for the sandbags they used to fill the moat, soldiers were forced to cut up their tents, which meant sleeping in the trenches under the open sky. It was no wonder that they froze to death en masse, or deserted to escape these terrible conditions. On their march toward Kanizsa, Russworm’s armies suffered similar losses. Although they had brought tents, they were unable to pitch them, and thus 3000 men and women and 300 horses would perish along the way.111

However, disease resulted not just from the rain and the cold, but also from the heat. According to Ortelius, hot weather contributed to the illnesses and deaths of soldiers in the month of August in both 1596 and 1598. In both instances, dehydration led to fatigue and eventually to death.112

Hygiene in the camps was also a serious problem. Fronsberger’s work contains an undated set of regulations which established strict sanitary procedures for camp latrines and abattoirs in hopes of preventing epidemics.113 However, outbreaks of contagious diseases could not be avoided. As a result of haphazard burial practices and a lack of basic hygiene, an epidemic broke out during the siege of Esztergom in 1595; its casualties included deputy commander Karl von Mansfeld.114 Kober also reports that one year later, a physician who had arrived with the troops from Upper Austria also died during an epidemic at the siege of Hatvan. When the defenders’ artillery forced his camp into retreat and he was out tending to the wounded, Leonhard Rauwolff drank from the Zagyva river (“Hadwaniensisaquae”), at which point, according to Kober, the urine and feces in the water poisoned him. The old medic was ignored in the camp, was not treated adequately, and eventually died of constant diarrhea that September.115 Two years later, as the Christian army was retreating to the Szigetköz, the flooding Danube soaked their camp. The resulting epidemic afflicted Adolf von Schwarzenberg, Bernhard Leo Gall, and Geizkofler, but in the end, only a few of their cohort would die of it.116

Conclusion

The entirety of Austro-Hungarian and European society was represented in the Imperial and Royal Army at the end of the sixteenth century. We find soldiers who enlisted out of a sense of Christian duty, impoverished nobles, and citizens seeking honor and adventure. As in the Thirty Years’ War, however, it was the penniless who made up the great mass of the armed forces. Trying to escape poverty and starvation, these initially unarmed recruits and their families had to face everyday dangers in the Hungarian theater of war: mortal violence, destitution caused by unpaid wages, epidemics, and exposure to the elements. They strove to survive through fraud and deceit, as well as by looting and ransacking their environment. Already by the end of the fourteenth century, their rulers had been trying, through various decrees, to prohibit such “solutions”, but in vain—their everyday survival strategies simply did not comport with the norms set down for them by the authorities.117

Joining the military did not solve the long-term problem of subsistence. Even so, it happened more than once during the Long Turkish War that more people showed up at a muster of a regiment than could be accommodated. For many, there was no way to return to their former lives. They spent the time between their terms of service wandering about as vagrants (gartender Knecht), waiting to be mustered again.118

These roving, armed soldiers and their families, meanwhile, tried to support themselves by means of minor (or more serious) criminal acts, often imposing significant burdens on local populations. However, these methods allowed soldiers to secure a living for themselves and their families only in the short term. And because of they were under-housed and perpetually malnourished, their constitutions were even less capable of withstanding the climatic ordeals and accompanying illnesses that confronted them on the battlefields of Hungary.

It is important to reiterate that among the soldiers who arrived in the Kingdom of Hungary in this period, we find the unprepared and unqualified alongside mercenaries who had fought in numerous campaigns and knew their weapons well. Therefore, it is incorrect to assume that every recruit who reached the Hungarian theater of war would have been completely unprepared militarily; however, it would be equally irresponsible to assert that they were all trained professionals.

 

Archival Sources

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv

Kriegsarchiv

Hofkriegsratakten

Wien Expedit

Wien Registratur

Prag

Bestallungen

Alte Feldakten

Hofkammerarchiv

 

Niederösterreichische Gedenkbücher 1595–1596

 

Mandate, Patente und Passbriefe in Kriegssachen (MPP)

Kriegsakten

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Balázs Lázár

Turkish Captives in Hungary during Austria’s Last Turkish War (1788–91)

 

During the last Turkish war of the Habsburg Monarchy (1788–91), several hundred Ottoman soldiers were taken prisoner by the Habsburg army and accommodated in Hungarian fortresses. Numerous rules and orders were issued by Joseph II regarding the treatment of these prisoners. These rules represent interesting mixes of the new ideas of the Enlightenment and old habits. According to these regulations, the captured Turks were given the status of prisoner of war and were provided with regular supplies. The study also examines the circumstances of the capture, the lives, and often the deaths of the Turkish prisoners in Hungary, as well as the exchanges of prisoners, which began only slowly but eventually resulted in their release. The fate of the Austrian prisoners in Turkish captivity is also briefly discussed. The paper was completed exclusively on the basis of primary sources.

Keywords: Austro–Turkish War (1788–91), prisoners of war, treatment of captives, exchanges of prisoners, Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Hungary

 

Introduction

Until recently, the fate of captives and prisoners of war was one of the most neglected chapters of the military history.1 Interest in this topic, however, has grown considerably, parallel with the evolution of new approaches, e. g. “the new military history” or John Keegan’s novel perspective of the common soldier. These current trends in military history also have evinced significantly more interest in the fate of noncombatants and other “minor characters” of the conflicts than previous histories of “the warlords.” Inspired by a vague notion, this study examines the question of Turkish prisoners held captive in Hungary during the Turkish War of Joseph II, a topic that in the end proved more interesting than one might first have assumed, and also by and large has been ignored in the secondary literature.2 In the historiography, prisoners are usually presented only as a data, in spite of the fact that there is a wealth of sources on which scholars could draw. I found valuable and essentially untouched archival materials on the Turkish prisoners of war in the Military Archive in Budapest, where the documents of the Hungarian General Commando (the territorial organization of the Habsburg military administration, the “outstretched arm” of the Aulic War Council) is preserved. Not surprisingly, the other rich source, one is tempted to use the word “goldmine,” is the archival material of the Aulic War Council in the Kriegsarchiv Vienna. The so-called Lacy-reforms from 1766 established an unparalleled bureaucracy, and the records that were kept provide researchers with a vast array of sources. This raw material of the Habsburg military administration is especially useful if one is interested in going beyond the traditional themes of military history, as in this particular case, which concerns the treatment with prisoners. For example, the thorough Habsburg bureaucracy recorded the names, the ranks, the ages and the origins of thousands of Turkish prisoners in muster rolls, so we have a precise overview of the contemporary Ottoman army in the Balkans.

In addition, one can glean significant data concerning the army and the state of the enlightened absolutisms at work. The fates of the Turkish prisoners suggest a rigid, slow system that was, however, not without humanity. This state was headed by a restless but also very demanding ruler, Joseph II. His short but usually comprehensive and sometimes sarcastic notes on the files may well reveal more about his personality than the hundreds of studies that have been written on him, whether apologetic or condemning. His decisions in concrete cases show the limits of his “enlightened” thinking.

This study is concerned first and foremost with the Ottoman prisoners in Austrian captivity and in the area of Hungary.3 Did they enjoy the same treatment as their Western counterparts? Was their status as prisoners of war acknowledged at all? What sort of rules applied to them? How could the Austrian military bureaucracy solve the potential problems of supplying hundreds of people from another religion and culture with shelter and sustenance, however minimal? How did their captivity come to an end?

First, I am going to summarize the contemporary norms and practices regarding prisoners of war in Europe. Then, I will describe the rules issued by Joseph II in the course of this war. I also discuss the circumstances under which the masses of prisoners were taken, the details of their transportation, accommodation and supply in Hungary, and the problems that arose concerning the maintenance of watch over them and numerous events, such as outbreaks of unrest and escapes. I also touch briefly on the conditions under which the Austrian soldiers in Ottoman captivity lived, since their fates were intertwined with those of the captured Turks during the exchange processes. The development of these processes proved to be rather interesting, and many useful sources are available, so the question of prisoner exchange is one of the focal points of my study.

Captivity in the Eighteenth Century

It is difficult to find a comprehensive work regarding the unwritten law of captivity before the age of formal international conventions and the Great War. Although the “ransom-culture” of the Middle Ages4 and the Early Modern Period5 have met with some interest among historians, the Age of Enlightenment (what one might also refer to as the Napoleonic period) was rather neglected from this point of view, apart from some cursory comments in standard works and some focused studies.6 The rough outlines of the system, however, can be drawn. As a result of the evolution of standing armies after the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and the limited wars of the eighteenth century, warfare tended to show a “milder” face. The armies were paid, fed and clothed in a more regular way than they had been during the long and brutal Thirty Years War. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when wars were already being fought by professional mercenary armies, it was common practice to press captured mercenaries into the service of their captor. It was almost daily routine during the Thirty Years War, although this custom had gradually disappeared by the end of the seventeenth century, parallel with the evolution of the new standing armies, though as late as 1756, Frederick the Great attempted to press the whole encircled and captured Saxon army into the Prussian army. In the eighteenth century, however, the exchange of prisoners became common practice and even the primary practice when dealing with soldiers who had been taken captive. Before or during a campaign, the opposing commanders (or even rulers) concluded an official agreement, the so called cartel, which regulated the quotas and set the terms. Moreover, committees were formed to supervise the process and overcome the difficulties. These committees consisted of officers and commissaries from both parties. The basic rule of the exchange was reciprocity, but sometimes it proved to be impossible: generally one belligerent had more prisoners than the other, or one had captured more officers etc. To address these differences, various kinds of quotas were established. For example, one sergeant “counted” as two privates and a lieutenant as twelve; a colonel was worth as much as 48 men.7 The old habits of ransoming were still alive in an altered form: a prisoner in the middle of the eighteenth century could hope that his state would agree to pay the ransom, knowing, however, that this sum might be deducted from his future pay.8 For a captured high-ranking general one could ask a huge prize. During the Seven Years War (1756–63), in the conflicts between Prussia and Austria a Field-Marshall could be ransomed for 15,000 Gulden or exchanged for 3,000 privates.9

The fates of the prisoners were also determined by the circumstances of their captivity. This period was famous for sophisticated siege warfare. When a commander and the garrison of a besieged fortress had fulfilled their duty but nonetheless been compelled to capitulate, their performances were usually acknowledged in the document of the capitulation, which might even grant them free leave with or without arms. Sometimes they had to give their word not to fight for a year or so. If captivity was nevertheless unavoidable, in such documents the circumstances of the arrest―especially for officers who had been captured―were also regulated.

As armies and warfare evolved, international law began to put down modest roots. In 1625, Hugo Grotius had stated, “[i]t has long been a maxim, universally received among the powers of Christendom, that prisoners of war cannot be made slaves, so as to be sold, or compelled to the hardships and labor attached to slavery.”10 Grotius’ thesis was widely known throughout Europe by the Age of Enlightenment.

This protection, though based on moral, unwritten law and habits, obviously did not apply to the Turkish prisoners during the wars of liberation at the end of the seventeenth century. On the contrary, the captured Turks could be freely bought and sold. The Ottomans and mostly their tributaries, the Crimean Tartars, also made a huge profit from the ransoms that were paid by Christians to free prisoners.11 The Peace of Karlowitz (1699) marked the end of this practice. The 12th point of the treaty declared that all prisoners should be mutually released.12 The Treaty of Passarowitz, which restored the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary (1718), included this stipulation, but when an enemy of the Sultan had been less successful, the Porte showed little interest in returning prisoners who had already been sold. After the Treaty of Belgrade (1739), the difference between the fates of the Russian and the Austrian prisoners was striking. The former were released relatively quickly without ransom, and sometimes the Porte even bought back them from private hands in order to release them. Of the Austrian prisoners, the state-owned galley rowers were released, but others were enslaved until as late as the 1750s, and Austrian diplomats and monks from the Trinitarian Order continued to pay ransom for them. The explanation for this different approach is simple. The Russians had scored considerable successes during the war, taking thousands of Turkish prisoners, but the Austrians had mostly suffered setbacks.13

After almost half a century of peace, a new war threatened to break out in the Danube Valley. In accordance with the Russo–Austrian treaty of 1781, Joseph II—rather unwillingly—had to declare war on the Ottomans after a Turkish “aggression” against Russia in August 1787, though as historians have persuasively argued, the Sultan was continuously provoked by the Russians. The Czarina, motivated by the Polish precedent, had ambitious plans for the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, and Joseph felt that he had to keep peace with the Russians (who he felt were likely to win), although Vienna had had good relations with Constantinople since the 1740s. But at the beginning of February 1788, war was formerly declared. The Austrians had a very cautious operation plan whereby six army or independent corps were to be deployed along the Turkish border. The main army (under Field-Marshall Lacy), concentrated around Zimony (Zemun, in Serbia), tried to capture Belgrade, while the corps of Slavonia and Croatia invaded Bosnia from the valleys of the Una and Sava Rivers. On the other side of the Danube River, a corps covered the Banat. A weak corps protected Transylvania, while the army of Prince Friedrich Josias of Sachsen-Coburg, in cooperation with the Russians, operated from Galicia and Bukovina in the direction of Moldau and later Wallachia.14

Rules regarding Prisoners

As in almost every walk of life, Joseph II was not satisfied with the traditions, habits and unwritten laws of the past in the case of the captured Turks. The problems with regard to Turkish prisoners first came up in a report from Bukovina. On March 5, 1788, Prince Coburg put a question to the Aulic War Council in Vienna (Wiener Hofkriegsrat). Coburg wanted to know what kind of provisions were due to the recently captured Ottomans. How much money should be spent on food and accommodation? Should bread be issued in kind or in cash? Field-Marshall Graf Andreas Hadik, President of the War Council, faced the task of finding solutions to this problem. Hadik wrote a note to Emperor Joseph II on March 20, 1788 in which he declared, “searching in the old files of the previous war in the archive, we could find no specific information about this question [that of providing sustenance and lodging for Turkish prisoners].” Some scattered information was be found, however, according to which the high-ranking Turkish prisoners were simply to be exchanged for captured Christians as soon as possible. One could also claim a significant sum of money (Ranzionirungs Geld), as much as 100 Ducats or more. The “temporary” costs of these persons were covered by the Court Chamber (the main financial organ of the empire), and these expanses were to be added to the ransom. The common Ottoman soldiers were nevertheless delivered to imperial officers as servant, handed over to galley, or assigned other compulsory labor.15

All in all, Hadik had not found satisfactory solutions from the past regarding provisions for and treatment of the Ottoman prisoners. He asked for a resolution to this problem from the sovereign. In the end, it was Joseph who had to make the decision, which he composed immediately on Hadik’s note. Interestingly, this new regulation was a mix of the mentality of the Enlightenment and the habits of the past. According to the imperial resolution, four categories were established, to which the captured Ottoman soldiers were to be assigned. The main principle of this categorization was the religion of the person captured. In the case of a Muslim prisoner, he should receive a supply of 4 Kreuzers daily in cash, together with one ordinary portion (one pound) of bread. These conditions were the same in the case of Prussians who had been captured (during the war of 1778–79) and French prisoners taken five years later.16

At the same time, a Christian who was an Ottoman subject and had taken up arms against the Imperial troops was to be pressed into the army. These people were sent to distant garrisons on the other side of the empire in order to ensure that they would not be able to escape. If a prisoner were found unfit for military service, he was to be assigned some kind of “public work.” The Emperor cautioned captors to be watchful, “because the Ottomans dress the Christians just as they dress the Turks, so one must inspect them closely [i. e. medically to determine whether the prisoner had been circumcised or not].”

Christians who were not Ottoman subjects17 but had fought against the Imperial troops fell into the third category. They were to be interrogated as to their names and the details concerning their families and then sent to lifelong ship-hauling, the same fate as suffered by notorious criminals. Finally, Joseph ordered captured deserters (former Austrian soldiers) who had been captured were to be court-martialled immediately.18

There were also questions regarding the status of and provisions for captured Turkish officers.19 After a short hesitation, the Emperor acknowledged their status as if they were European “guests.” The commander of the Main Army, the pedant and hard-working Field Marshall Moritz Lacy, soon compiled a comprehensive breakdown of the ranks in the Ottoman Army and made a proposal concerning provisions for the captured officers. The highest rank on Lacy’s list was the Bin baschi, “commander of a detached corps,” who would receive 24 florins every month, just like a Janissary Aga or a Sipahi Aga, though no one would receive more than one portion of bread daily. Joseph accepted the proposal on April 30 in the camp at Zimony.20

One additional question remained to be addressed. What if one of the Muslim prisoners wanted to convert to the Christian faith? According to an imperial resolution, which was transmitted by an order from Hadik to the General Commando in Buda, if somebody “of his own will” declared his intention to convert, he had to be furnished with the necessary requisites and then released as a free man. His freedom, however, would not last not long. If the proselyte proved fit for military service, he was to be drafted immediately. Were he deemed unfit for military service, the “new citizen” would be settled far from the border and would be allowed to earn a living.21 Thus converting the faith meant becoming the subject of the Hungarian king just like centuries earlier.22

Very few prisoners actually chose to convert during their relatively short period of imprisonment, although the Austrian bureaucracy probably registered every case. It is also not surprising that captives, who were accommodated in the crowded fortress of Munkács (Mukacseve, Ukraine), where health conditions were hardly optimal, were perfectly willing to convert to Roman Catholicism if it meant getting out of the prison in the fortress.23

Falling into Captivity

The first large group of Turkish prisoners was captured in the siege of Szabács (Šabac, Serbia). This small, desolate fortress next to the river Sava River was in key position for every movement against Belgrade. Joseph himself conducted the siege, which started on April 20. The bombardment began immediately and in the early morning of April 24, the Austrian infantry made an assault against a breach. After having put up fierce resistance, the defenders were compelled to withdraw to the small inner fortress. Finally, on April 26, the garrison of Szabács capitulated.24 The Austrians captured three Turkish senior officers (a Janissary Aga and two other commanders: Achi Akbar and Achi Ibrahim), 33 officers, 32 non-commissioned officers (NCOs) and 617 privates. In the fortress there were 13 Greek-Christians (three merchants and 10 servants, “Knechte”) and five Jews.

In the terms of capitulation, the bellicose Joseph acknowledged the gallant and “soldier-like” behaviour of the Turkish defenders. Some officers were allowed to leave temporally on parole to take care of their families. The officers were allowed to wear their swords and keep their horses. The prisoners were transported to the Fortress of Pétervárad (Petrovaradin, Serbia) and later taken to Arad, Szeged and Károlyváros (Karlovac, Croatia) “at the cost of the state,” as Joseph emphasized to Chancellor Kaunitz.25 Ultimately the prisoners from Szabács were accommodated in Szeged (in the barracks of the so called Invaliden Commando) and the fortress of Arad. The former was designated for the officers and the latter for the NCOs and commoners.

In the case of the Christians and Jews who were captured in Szabács, their captors did not deliver the daily portion of bread, but rather gave them on the 4 Kreuzers they had been promised. In the case of Muslim prisoners, however, the regulations that had been set by Joseph and Lacy were followed.26

The Imperial generosity after the capitulation of Szabács soon caused problems. On July 4, Field-Marshall Lacy informed the Hungarian General Commando that the prisoners who had been released on parole had failed to return, so their comrades (i. e. their bailsmen), whom “they had left behind perfidiously,” had to put in irons, accommodated in the casemates and assigned to compulsory labor. They were allowed only to write one (and only one) letter regarding what had befallen them. Naturally their swords and knives were taken away and their horses were sold if their masters were unable to cover the costs of their sustenance. Other problems must have arisen, because Lacy reminded the commanders of Szeged and Arad of their responsibility regarding the excesses and misdeeds of the Turkish prisoners. The Field-Marshall finally demanded that not only the names of the deceased prisoners but also the causes of their deaths be reported to the Main Army Headquarters.27 Later in the autumn of 1788 Joseph strictly forbade all form of release on parole, and no requests for parole were allowed either, “because the Turkish prisoners are supplied everything that they need.”28

The second and third batch of prisoners was sent by Field-Marshall Gedeon Loudon, commander of the corps in Croatia and Slavonia. The little fortress of Dubica (Dubica, Bosnia and Herzegovina) at the river Una was encircled and later besieged from the middle of April. Having taken over command, Loudon had immediately started the bombardment on Dubica on August 18, 1788. The defenders soon were compelled to surrender. The Turkish commander tried to convince Loudon to grant the garrison free leave, but he rejected their entreaties and the 414 Ottoman soldiers29 were taken prisoner, although like Joseph at Szabács, in the terms of capitulation Loudon acknowledged their courage and endurance: “Dubica is now just a heap of stone and the disgusting smell of dead bodies and horses and cattle carcasses within make it hard to believe that the garrison was able to defend it for so long.”30 The officers were allowed the keep their sabers, and Loudon promised to take care of the wounded and sick Turkish soldiers in hospitals. The women and children who were found in Dubica were sent to inner Bosnia.31 The Turkish prisoners from Dubica were escorted to Gradisca (Nova Gradiška, Croatia) in Slavonia, where they remained until at least September 3, and then some time were taken to Hungary. We know only scattered details of their fates after this because of the sources.32 One transport was taken to the small but famous fortress of Szigetvár.33 The other half of them may have been escorted to Győr.

The next victim of the energetic and aggressive Loudon was the fortress of Novi (Novi Bosanski in Bosnia and Herzegovina), which was also situated near the Una River. The defenders again put up significant resistance and the first storming of the walls, which took place on September 21, was repulsed. The Austrian artillery nevertheless continued the siege and within a week the little fortress had been completely ruined. On October 3, the garrison capitulated.34 In Novi, Loudon took 590 Ottoman soldiers prisoner (566 Turks and 24 Vlachs).35 The question of their accommodation, however, created difficulties because of the deteriorating military situation. Taking advantage of the slowness and hesitation of the Austrian main army, which had been delayed near Belgrade, the Turks won the initiative. They had crossed the Danube River at Vidin and pushed back the Austrian army corps. Accompanied by 20,000 soldiers, Joseph rushed to defend the border at the Banat. At the end of September, his army was almost encircled by the enemy and Joseph ordered a withdrawal. At Karánsebes (Caransebeş, Romania) on the night of September 21, this movement changed to panic. The army retreated as far as Lugos (Lugoj, Romania). The imperial high command had good reason to fear the invasion of Banat, Transylvania or even southern Hungary.

In the middle of August, Joseph ordered that the prisoners be transported deeper into Hungary, specifically to Nagyvárad (Oradea, Romania). He also got the casern of Nagyvárad made suitable to provide lodging for the prisoners. Joseph also directed that “prisoners, who must do compulsory labor, should be treated the same way in Nagyvárad as they are in Arad and Szeged.”36 Nevertheless, until mid-autumn this order was only partially executed.

At the beginning of November 1788, the prisoners from Novi were sent to Arad and Szeged, so the initial fear of a Turkish invasion had already faded. The prisoners of Szabács must have been in Arad and Szeged already, because both places were described as “overcrowded,” like Szigetvár. Joseph finally decided that the prisoners from Novi had to be accommodated somewhere in northeastern Hungary, and Huszt (Khust, Ukraine), Szolnok, Ungvár (Uzhhorod, Ukraine), and Munkács were raised as possible destinations.37 In the end, most of them were taken to the fortress (and prison) of Munkács.

The Fate of the Prisoners in Hungary

The first Turkish prisoners of war (at the beginning only eight men) were held captive in the Fortress of Arad (Arad, Romania). In a short time, problems arose concerning provisions for them. On April 8, General Vinzenz Barco, the commanding general in Hungary, reported from Buda to Vienna on the problems faced by the fortress commandant of Arad. Except for bread, the Turkish prisoners were not willing to eat anything that had been touched by Christian hands, so he had had to supply them with firewood so that they would be able to cook themselves. Furthermore, the Turks had wanted to eat warm meals twice a day. Barco and the commandant of Arad sought a “highest resolution” on this question before more prisoners arrived. On April 17, the War Council sent an order according to which, apart from the daily one pound of bread and 4 Kreuzers, nothing should be given to the Turks.38 Interestingly, when there were several hundred prisoners in Arad and other places, Joseph changed his mind. On May 10, the emperor permitted the fortress commandant to supply them with firewood, but the Turks had to be satisfied with the “ordinary” portion and cook together.39

The issue of providing accommodation for the Turkish prisoners also caused headaches for the military and civil officials of the fortresses and municipalities. In Győr, at the end of 1788, the first suggestion regarding accommodation for these 500 men40 was to designate the empty college building of the suppressed Jesuit order for this purpose. This project failed because of the poor condition of the building. Finally, the decision was made to use the newly built casern to house the Turkish prisoners, but one company of Austrian soldiers which had guarded the prisoners had to take lodging in private domiciles in the city.41

At the beginning, the prisoners enjoyed “too much freedom” in Győr, as the War Council put it. Some Turks were allowed to go out into the city and walk the streets with lit pipes hanging from their mouths and wearing their sabers at their sides. Keeping their swords was the orderly privileges of the Turkish officers, granted by the document of capitulation of Dubica, but the private Turks also carried long knives with them, according to the complaints. The emperor forbade these practices and ordered that the Turks not leave the casern and that any and all knives be taken from the privates and only given back temporally when they were needed to “slice the meat.”42

The long winter and the crowded conditions in the casern soon took their toll. On February 10, 1789, the commander of the Lacy regiment reported to the Hungarian General Commando that 34 Turks (of the 610 prisoners) had died of some “extraordinary diseases,” despite the efforts of the regiment’s medical staff. The command therefore requested that no more prisoners be sent to Győr and that a military hospital be established near the city. In answer, the General Commando praised the regiment’s command for its efforts and offered the reassurance that no more prisoners would be sent to Győr, but rejected the idea of establishing a hospital.43

The presence of the prisoners in Győr raised other problems. The city was situated on the main communication road of the Danube River valley, so Joseph found it problematic to station numerous captured enemies there. On March 26, 1789 Hadik (according to the emperor’s note) instructed the Hungarian General Commando to take the prisoners to the fortress of Lipótvár (Leopoldov, Slovakia) in the northwest of Hungary.44 Hadik also ordered the expansion of the available building in order to accommodate possible transports in the future. Arrangements had to be made to provide lodging not only for the prisoners, but also for the soldiers (generally invalids) who would stand guard. In the case of Lipótvár, the nearby city of Nagyszombat (Trnava, Slovakia) was designated to accommodate the guards.

The order of Hadik was executed rather slowly indeed. The General Commando had had one group of prisoners transferred to Székesfehérvár earlier in April. On May 6, the Aulic Council made its resolution clear. The emperor again ordered the immediate transfer of all of the prisoners to Lipótvár.45 Consequently, several hundred Turks made a long detour to Székesfehérvár on their way to Lipótvár.

In Szigetvár, the responsible guard unit was compelled to report “great unrest” among the 266 Turkish prisoners from Dubica, who had demanded more freedoms.46 The cause of this unrest their loss of the right to go into the town from the fortress. It was Joseph who had prohibited this, not only for the Turks in Győr but for every prisoner of war in Hungary. The former commanders of the garrison, including three agas, submitted a written complaint to the emperor in which they quoted the promises they had received from Loudon at the capitulation of Dubica. Joseph, however, insisted that every Turkish prisoner was to be given the same treatment. Besides, as the order of the Aulic War Council to Szigetvár stated: “We have to make it clear to these agas that prisoners in our hands are treated more humanely than prisoners on the other side, so they had better stay calm.” In the same letter, the War Council ordered the guard in Szigetvár through the General Commando to take strict measures if necessary in order to prevent further unrest.47

In Munkács, in addition to the small rooms of the fortress, houses in the small town were also requisitioned for this purpose, so the General Commando had to engage in lengthy correspondence with the County of Bereg and its vicecomes. According to a November 4 report to the General Commando (Munkács), the fortress of Munkács and the neighboring Palanka casern could accommodate only 345 prisoners and a guard of 120 men, not the required 645 prisoners and 283 men. The rest had to be billeted in the domiciles of burghers until the necessary renovations of the fortress and the casern were completed.48

Within six months, however, it became clear that Munkács was not suitable for the accommodation of hundreds of prisoners. As had been the case in Győr, epidemics broke out, and the “awkwardness of having these people watched over by invalid soldiers and the resulting concerns about desertion” prompted the President of the War Council to propose a move to the casern in Kassa (Kosice, Slovakia) and to keep Munkács in reserve should 150 new prisoners arrive.49 Joseph agreed to the transfer, but he ordered that, in addition to Munkács, other places in Hungary be prepared to accommodate future transports. The move to Kassa took place at the end of June.50

One of the best indicators concerning the conditions under which these prisoners lived is their mortality rate. Despite the regular supply of provisions, the mortality rate was high according to any kind of modern standard. From September 1, 1788 to December 31, 1789, it was seven percent (of 281 prisoners, 20 died) in Szigetvár. In Lipótvár this figure was 5.5 percent (31 of 560), but in the case of Kassa the losses were enormous: 21 percent (168 of 791).51 Later, one could include the casualties of the infamous prison of Munkács, where unfortunate prisoners spent several months. The high mortality rate, however, was caused by conditions at the time, not by punishment or negligence.

“The Most Important Duty” – Guarding the Prisoners

The old and neglected buildings were not simply uncomfortable and unhealthy, they also raised serious security questions. The other problem was the composition of the guards who were responsible for watching the prisoners. The superannuated soldiers of the different Invaliden Commandos and the members of second-rate troop units like the garrison regiments and the staff-regiment were not always up to the task. However they received full pay while serving as guards.

On the night of November 8, 1788, four Turkish prisoners escaped from the Palanka casern. They managed to hide in the forests for several months. The commander of the fortress received a strict rebuke from the General Commando because of “his carelessness in his most important duty, which is guarding these prisoners.”52

There were other prison breaks too, of which the emperor demanded immediate and accurate account. On September 30, 1788, the General Commando reported to the Aulic War Council that two Turks had escaped from Lipótvár. They had not gotten far and were soon caught and brought back by the peasants. The fugitives were held under arrest until the emperor decided their fates. In his note about the case, as regards the punishment Hadik reminded Joseph of two other precedents: captured deserters from Zamość (see below) had had to do compulsory labor in chains, which were also worn in the night. First of all, “without any lengthy inquiry” they received “a certain number of strokes with the stick because that is the habit in this kind of case, which is very common in wars.” Hadik obviously regarded these as cases of desertion. In Munkács, the fugitives, who had already been captured and condemned to compulsory labor (digging entrenchments), had contemplated another plot to escape, so the final sentence in their case was ship-hauling, and they were each assigned to one of four different sites distant from one another. Hadik then asked for a resolution in the case of the fugitives, assuring the emperor that the question of who bore responsibility for the prison break in Lipótvár would be examined by the General Commando. The imperial resolution was short: “they are sentenced to ship-hauling.”53

All in all, guarding the Turkish prisoners was not a rewarding task. On 24, February 1789, all of the 31 Turks in the Galician fortress of Zamość (today Poland) managed to escape with the help of a soldier they had bribed, a private from the 1st Garrison Regiment. The latter was court-martialed and executed, but the garrison-commandant, Major Marquis de Torres, was also sentenced to a 14-day arrest according to the order of Joseph because “he did not personally take care of the gate key.” Torres also had to pay the calculated ransom for the 31 fugitives. The commanding general of Galicia also received a slight rebuke, because Zamość was deemed a bad choice as a place to hold prisoners, since it is situated too close to the border.54

At the beginning of the war, Joseph and his military advisors might have expected a “flood of prisoners” following the Austrian successes. This did not come to pass. Four years later, however, Munkács, Arad, Szeged and some other places in the Kingdom of Hungary nonetheless had to accommodate thousands of prisoners. These prisoners, however, were not faithful Muslims, but rather enthusiastic French patriots or even Jacobins.55

Exchange of Prisoners

On October 27, from Zimony Joseph replied to an enquiry by Loudon:

“The proposal [made by the Turks] concerning the exchange of prisoners can be made, but not as the Turks have envisioned, i.e. not one for one, which would mean one officer for one private and vice versa. This exchange must only be made such that officers are exchanged for officers or, according to the circumstances and the rank of the officer, 3, 6, 9 or more privates [should be given] for one officer.”56

Joseph then designated the commander of the Austrian troops in Beschania to supervise the exchange of prisoners, and he had Loudon suggest to the Turks that the Pasha of Belgrade be the person responsible for the exchanges on the Turkish side.

However, a larger and centrally organized exchange of prisoners did not actually take place for one year. The cause of this delay must have been the “forgetfulness” of the prisoners of Szabács, Novi and Dubica who had been released on parole. Not one of them returned to the Austrians. The punishments that were inflicted on their comrades and bailsmen were to no avail. The exchange might have been complicated or hindered by the inconsistency of Turkish customs concerning prisoners, which I will discuss later. Briefly, there were simply not enough Austrian prisoners of war at the same time and same places (near the frontline and not in the distant Constantinople) to provide a basis for negotiations.

Along the Croat and Slavonic Militärgrenz (Military Border), low-scale exchanges might have been quite common, but these cases effected exclusively Grenzers and generally only involved a small number of men. The Turks and the Grenzers often had prisoners on hand because of the endless raids on both sides of the cordon. Nevertheless, cattle, oxen, and horses always represented a far more valuable target.57 Sometimes, this kind of affair was similar to kidnapping and blackmailing. Sources suggest that once it even came to pass that marauding Turks captured the wife of a Grenzer in the district of Brod. They demanded not only one Turkish prisoner for the women, but also 45 florins. The transaction was concluded, but the poor family of the Grenzer had not been able to pay the ransom, so the money was finally paid from the cash register of the Broder canton. This rather trivial case had come before the Emperor in the form of a note from the President of the War Council. Joseph had been angry: “It is nonsense that we exchanged a soldier for a woman and that, in addition, 10 Ducats was also paid. The man who arranged this ransom without preliminary consent has to pay the 10 Ducats. The War Council will have to see to it.” 58

In the end, the first step towards a regular prisoner exchange was taken by the Turks. The beg of Ostrožac (Bosnia), Mustafa Besirevich, wrote a proposal on August 21, 1789 to his “Dearest Neighbor,” Vice-Colonel Matthias Rukavina, commander of the Oguliner Border Regiment, about a “general prisoner exchange” and in particular about the possibility of exchanging a captured Grenzer officer (Lieutenant Phillipovich) for a certain Mustafa Cserich Beg, who was himself the brother of the Beg of Ostrožac. As the letter revealed, earlier Rukavina had made an offer to ransom Phillipovich for cash, but the Beg realized he had an opportunity to get back his brother. This personal bias was a significant help to the cause of the exchange, but first the Beg had to remedy the problems concerning Turks of Novi and Dubica who had been released on parole but who had not returned.59 The Beg suggested in his letter to Rukavina that if the proposed exchange were to be successful, the “perfidious” Turks, about 30 people, would hardly go back. Rather, they would probably buy and send home Christian prisoners to secure their release once and for all. If the exchange were not to take place, the Beg was willing to turn to the Grand Vizier to ask for his assistance.60

Put simply, under the pretext of a “general exchange” the Beg of Ostrožac wanted to get back his brother. His proposal, however, may have met with Vienna’s interest because providing sustenance and accommodation for more than 1,500 prisoners in Hungary alone would have represented a significant burden to the state. So Joseph willingly permitted the “general exchange” as soon as he got some compensation (albeit in the form of faint guarantees) for the missing Turks of Novi and Dubica. The proposal of the Beg of Ostrožac also suggests that earlier some of the border guards (Grenzers) had broken the pledges (“good faith”) that they had made to the Turks promising that they would return shortly with the ransom. Some of them had simply fled. The emperor agreed to release one Turkish prisoner for every Austrian soldier who had been released by the Turks after having pledged to return shortly with his ransom but who had then broken his word and never returned. Joseph also permitted Field Marshall-lieutenant Christoph Wallisch, commander of the Croatian corps who was in charge of taking some of the prisoners from Hungary to Croatia, to ease the approaching exchanges. He ordered, however, that he give specific details concerning accomodation and provisions, since “they [the Turkish prisoners] do not have the same freedoms as are allowed for prisoners on their side.”61

Almost one month before the final imperial decision on August 5, 1789, Wallisch established an Exchange Committee (Rancionirung Comission) under the command of a Grenz officer colonel (who later that year became a general), Daniel Peharnik. The Committee stipulated first and foremost that for the 30 Turkish prisoners who had been released on parole but who had not returned a suitable number of Austrian prisoners should be released in compensation. Furthermore, instead of strict rules, Colonel Peharnik enjoyed a wide scope of authority to judge in every case with regards to how many Turkish privates he should exchange for an Austrian officer or NCO (or vice versa). The committee would have no say regarding cases in which the process of ransoming had already began. For example, for Capitan Siegenfeld from the Licca Grenz Regiment the emperor had already approved a “ransom of 100 pound in gold and 66 gulden in Taller.” A site in Bosnia, Bashina Luca near Dresnik (Drežnik Grad, Croatia), was designated for the exchanges as Rancionirungs Platz. Colonel Peharnik would have to arrive at an agreement with the enemy about the conditions of the process; for example how strong should the Austrian and Turkish escort be? The committee would have to be sure that “[o]n the days of the exchange process in the area of Dresnik there will be no hostilities or fights, neither from the Turkish side nor from our side, but all will remain quiet, peaceful and friendly.”

So as of the autumn of 1789, the permanent and organized exchanges had begun. At the end of September, Lieutenant Phillipovich was successfully exchanged for the Bosnian beg mentioned below. Maybe to show their goodwill, on October 8 and 14 ten Grenzers (all private solders) were released by the enemy for the 30 frequently mentioned Turks from Novi. 62

Nevertheless, Austrian prisoners who had been captured by the Turks somewhere other than the area of Bosnia and the neighboring Military Border seem not to have been considered in the discussions regarding prisoner exchanges. In Constantinople in the infamous slave-house Bagno, 17 Austrian officers and 458 NCOs and privates were lingering in misery in the autumn of 1789.63 The president of the War Council at the time made a logical proposal with regards to trying to exchange them for Turkish prisoners in Austrian hands. Hadik was also encouraged by the recent exchanges at the Croatian border.64 However, in his reply Joseph summarized the problem concerning the issue of their possible exchange, removing the question from the agenda at the same time:

“The prisoners in Bagno are the propriety of the Sultan and there is no use in having the French ambassador in Constantinople65 to set them free anymore. Every person who was captured from our forces by the Bosnians belongs to his captor and the Sultan has nothing to do with it, thus the Porte does not care about Turks who have been captured by our forces either. Under such circumstances, the prisoners in Bagno may have nothing to hope of from the proposal of the War Council and for the time being there are no further steps to be taken with regards to the question of these prisoners.”66 It was therefore also clear to the emperor that the Bosnians must have been interested only in their compatriots, so there was only hope for the exchange of prisoners who had belonged to the garrisons of Novi and Dubica.

The fortunes of war following the capture of Belgrade67 (on 8 October 1789) by Loudon and the Russo-Austrian successes in Moldau and Wallachia had turned to the favor of Vienna and Saint Petersburg. In 1790, operations were conducted primarily in the valley of Morava and on the Lower Danube River, but on a lower scale. Meanwhile, in Vienna Joseph II died on February 20 of a pulmonary illness, with which he had been infected in the camp during the campaign of 1788. He left his brother Leopold II an exhausted state in the throes of revolt. Leopold’s most vital task was making peace with the Porte before Prussia backstabbed the monarchy. On July 27, 1790, an agreement was signed with Prussia in which Austria promised peace with the Ottomans on the basis of the status quo ante.68 The war-weary parties concluded an armistice in Giurgevo (Giurgiu, Romania) on September 23, 1790. Then, in Svistov (Svishtov, Bulgaria) a long peace-conference began. During the Austro-Turkish negotiations, Russia continued the war with the Porte, ignoring external pressure from other European powers.

As I have shown, the exchange of prisoners began in the autumn of 1789 and by February 1790 almost all of the prisoners from Novi and Dubica had been released in the abovementioned site in Bosnia.69 In return, the Austrians got back men from the Border regiments who had been captured, but for the time being no one from Constantinople, as Joseph had foreseen.

On June 17, 1790, Chancellor Kaunitz made an interesting proposal to the “Apostolic King” Leopold.70 Kaunitz had spotted in the muster-role one qadi and three imams among the prisoners of Szabács, who were being held in Kassa, and two imams in the prison of Beszterce (Bistrița, Romania). To make gestures to the Turks and at the same time to attempt to ease the sufferings of the Austrian captivities in Constantinople, the Chancellor suggested releasing these six non-combatants without any compensation. According Kaunitz, this gesture would also facilitate the task of Baron Peter Herbert, the Austrian envoy to the Porte, who was working hard to organize the peace conference at the time. The king approved the proposal.71 The War Council ordered the Hungarian and the Transylvanian General Commando to release the “literates” and escort them to the cordon between the two armies in Serbia and in Wallachia.72

The very few sources available indicate that as of the conclusion of the armistice on September 23, there were efforts to exchange the Austrian prisoners in Constantinople for the Turks held primarily in Hungary and Transylvania. There were hopes that the exchange would include the enslaved peasants taken during the war by the Turks. The new president of the Aulic War Council, Cavalry-General Ferdinand von Tige, ordered the commander of the main army in Belgrade, Field-Marshall Michael von Wallis, who also had been recently appointed, that he had to take the necessary steps to ensure the return of the Grenzer families, who had been taken during the Turkish raids on Banat and southern Transylvania in the autumn of 1788.73

After the conclusion of the armistice and even before the opening of the peace conference in Svistov, the parties might have wanted to solve the problem of the prisoners. On September 29, 1790, the War Council demanded from the General Commando the “most accurate” account of the Turkish prisoners of war staying in Hungary because of the forthcoming “official prisoner exchange.”74 On October 4, the commander of the Main Army, Field Marshall Wallis, informed the General Commando from Belgrade that according to Baron Herbert, the exchange of prisoners had to take place before the opening of peace conference, so he had to receive the accounts concerning the prisoners as soon as possible. Wallis asked for two separate accounts, one for the Christians and one for the Muslims. He also asked for a list of the Turkish women and children in captivity.75

On December 1, Wallis, acting on a suggestion of Field Marshall-lieutenant Enzenberg, reported to the War Council from Belgrade that the focal point of the prisoner exchange would be moved from the Croatian border to Ruschuk (Ruse, Bulgaria), so Wallis suggested that a certain major, Count Strassoldo, serve as head of the newly appointed exchange commission.76

Wallis, however, waited for the Turks to take the initial step. When he received information according to which a batch of released Austrian prisoners (7 officers and 93 privates) had arrived in Ruschuk from Constantinople, he immediately (on January 10, 1790) asked the General Commando to send 300 prisoners from Kassa to Temesvár (Timişoara, Romania), because there were not enough prisoners in Transylvania and Galicia to release in exchange. Buda forwarded the order to the Invalid Commando in Kassa that day.77 As Wallis indicated in his report, the Turks transported the Austrian officers by horse and the common prisoners by carts to the exchange site. In the name of reciprocity, the Austrians were also expected to move their prisoners from Kassa to the border by the same means of transportation.78

The withdrawal of the Turkish prisoners from Hungary and other parts of the Habsburg Monarchy, however, lasted for months. According to the report of the exchange commission, from January 10, 1791 to March 29 of the same year, 1,238 Turks were handed over to the Turkish commissar, Mohamed Emin, in six stages. In return, the kaiserlich-königliche army received only 18 officers and 538 NCOs and privates from the slave house in Constantinople. The exchanges took place in Giurgevo (opposite Ruschuk on the northern part of the Danube River) and around Vidin.79

The peace was finally signed in Sistova on August 4, 1791, but the real winner of the war had been Russia, which had gained Crimea once for all, and, with it, dominance over the Black Sea, in the peace of Jassy, which was signed on January 9, 1792. The last Turkish war of Austria, which caused so much death, suffering and destruction, ended with very few results. Belgrade and Wallachia had to be handed back to the Ottomans. Only the town of Orşova and two small strips on the Croatian frontier were ceded to Austria at the price of at least 30,000-40,000 soldiers lost (most of whom had succumbed to disease, like emperor Joseph II himself) and thousands more civilians killed, forced to flee, impoverished or even enslaved.80

Conclusion

To respond to the questions raised in the introduction, Joseph II, who strove for uniformity in every respect, granted the captured Turks soldiers prisoner-of-war status. Indeed he was rather ahead of his time. In the first convention of Geneva (1864), the rights of the prisoners of war were recognized by the majority of military powers. These rights were roughly similar to those prescribed by Joseph for Turkish prisoners of war some three generations earlier. As I have shown, captives were given regular supplies and enjoyed almost similar portions in kind and in cash as an Austrian common soldier in peacetime. They could also keep their money and personal belongings. The sick and wounded Turks were looked after in military hospitals, although these lazarettos were known by the Austrian soldiers themselves as places to be avoided at all cost. Joseph acknowledged the status of the enemy officers, too. Captives were permitted to write letters home, although translated summaries of these letters made it as far as the writing desk of the emperor in Vienna. In January 1789, Joseph finally prohibited correspondence by prisoners.81

On the other hand Joseph was not willing to grant Christians who served in the Ottoman army the status of prisoner of war. They were treated as mercenaries, not “legal” combatants, so the logical step was to press them into the Austrian army. This method also suited well the practices of the embryonic mass-armies, which suffered from a constant deficiency of manpower. It was, however, always emphasized that this measure only applied to Christians who had actually taken arms against the Austrian troops, and not to servants or other auxiliaries. By that time, the non-Muslim elements of the Ottoman Army consisted of mainly peasants, who had been forced to dig trenches, transport materials, and other serve auxiliary functions. This meant that most of the captured Christians fell in the non-combatant category and only a few of them were forced into the Austrian army. One other possible reason for this distinction may have lain in the efforts Joseph had previously made to prompt Orthodox Christian Serbs and Romanians to rise up and rebel against the Ottoman yoke.82

Methodically, however, it would be fairer to compare the Austrian conduct with regards to captives to the conduct of the two other belligerents, the Ottomans and the Russians. In this context, the measures taken by the Austrian army were remarkably humane. In some cases, neither the Turks nor the Russians bothered to take prisoners at all. Cossacks on the Russian side and Tartars on the Ottoman side were famous for their cruelty. There were countless examples of brutality. The Russians under Prince Potemkin massacred the Turkish garrison of the Fortress of Ochakov during the final assault on the night of December 16, 1788. During the capture of Ismail, the other Russian commander, Suvorov, had his troops to kill everyone in the fortress on December 10, 1790. 4,000 enemy soldiers were massacred in a few hours. 83

Europeans believed that the Turks generally killed and beheaded their Christian prisoners on the spot because their officers would reward them for every decapitated head. Many memoires and official reports mention this habit, which may not have been simply “barbarism,” brutality or religious fanaticism. A certain Prussian officer, J. E. G. Hayne, explained the Turkish “barbarity” by religious hatred, and, most importantly, lack of discipline. Hayne contended that European troops were also inclined to commit such acts when, after a bloody and chaotic fight, discipline and the control of the officers had been shaken, as happened during and after the final assault on Buda in 1686. The Turkish commanders might also have used this as a means of compensating their men for the lost ransoms, since otherwise the soldiers would have been busying themselves with their prisoners instead of doing their military duty. 84

If someone nevertheless survived the first minutes of captivity, then came the real ordeals. On September 21, 1788, 822 Austrian soldiers of the Austrian rearguard at Karánsebes were taken prisoner, among them a young Hungarian first-lieutenant, György Görgey.85 His vivid account provides a clear picture of their suffering on the long death march to Constantinople. In the end of the 822 men, only 125 prisoners arrived to the capital alive. The rest perished because of inadequate supplies and bad treatment during the 70-day march. Those who were no longer able to walk were killed immediately. Their heads were chopped off and their bodies were left to rot. The heads were shown as trophies, while “our companions severed the ears of the dead to account for the prisoners.”86 Nevertheless, Görgey also witness some humane conduct and saw examples of kindness by the captors, but usually they were simply either unable or unwilling to organize the provision of sustenance and accommodation for several hundred men. It was also embarrassing for the Turkish commanders that instead of the promised 4,000 prisoners, they only had 125 to show to the people of Constantinople.

In this context, one can understand the angry words of Joseph in reply to the protest of the Turks held in Szigetvár: “We have to make it clear to these agas that prisoners in our hands are treated more humanely than prisoners on the other side, so they had better stay calm.”87

 

Archival Sources

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (Vienna), Haus- Hof und Staatsarchiv, Kriegsarchiv. Zentralstelle, Wiener Hofkriegsrat, Hauptreihe.

HM Hadtörténelmi Levéltár, Budapest [War History Archives, Budapest] Documents of the k. k. General Commando in Ungarn.

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